Social Bookmarking - Challenge # 13 (and # 2)

I'm doing this all out of order. I already have a del.icio.us account, so I'm posting about # 13 first (though, technically, this also takes care of # 2). Here's a write up I had previously done:

Social bookmarking sites, such as http://del.icio.us/, allow the user to store and share their personal bookmarks online, allowing access to those bookmarks from any internet-enabled computer. Most social bookmarking sites allow the user to arrange their resources with “tags,” or user-defined keywords.

Advantages: Tags are searchable, and should allow for easier retrieval of Web sites than Internet browser bookmarking systems. Bookmarked sites can be seen as “user approved” sites. Links are “portable.” Sharing allows for the discovery of new Web sites.

Disadvantages: Unstructured approach to user classification (no controlled vocabulary). Some sites only allow a single tag.


http://www.wordspy.com/words/socialbookmarking.asp:
social bookmarking pp. Saving and applying keywords to one's personal collection of Web site bookmarks on a site that enables other people to share those bookmarks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to store, classify, share and search Internet bookmarks.


http://del.icio.us/about/ (copied and pasted from the del.icio.us site):

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website -- the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

What is social bookmarking?

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages.
First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you're at work, in a library, or on a friend's computer.

Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private -- only viewable by you -- if you like.)

Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember -- which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.