Is social bookmarking worth the trouble?
With all of the talk of microblogging and lifestreaming of late, I wonder how the lowly old art of social bookmarking is doing.
I think this question is particularly pertinent given that FriendFeed is giving new and heightened visibility to any kind of social media activity. For example, you can use FriendFeed to monitor your friends’ social bookmarking activity that occurs on sites like Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon, Furl, and Google Shared Stuff.
Seeing this activity front and center in a new way made me think about how and why we use social bookmarking. As I see it, there are four main reasons for indulging in social bookmarking.
- Used to track websites for our own future use
- Used to share information with our friends and social media contacts
- Used to support your friends and contacts in social media to help build up your own social media profile
- Used to build links back to websites for SEO purposes
The interesting thing about this is that the last three reasons are not for your own personal information tagging – they are for directing web traffic (i.e. other people) to specific websites. Although each person’s reasons for bookmarking will vary, there are plenty of reasons to bookmark for other people or for reasons other than their own information retrieval.
Therefore, when you see people bookmarking stuff in Del.icio.us, is it more likely that they are saving this information for someone other than themselves?
Bookmarking seems to be evolving from the original purpose of saving information for your own use at some later date. However, it’s still perfectly fine for its original purpose. However, how many of us really use it to its fullest potential?
I’ve researched social bookmarking on several different occasions. I looked at Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, Netvouz and Google Bookmarks, as well as StumbleUpon. Without question I use StumbleUpon more than any other bookmarking application but I rarely go back to check out the things that I’ve bookmarked, nor do I ever search through StumbleUpon by tags.
For ease of use it’s hard to beat Del.icio.us, including its toolbar. Yet it seems so spartan.
Ma.gnolia hasn’t made much of an impression on me, although I understand it has strong groups and community.
Netvouz is probably the strongest bookmarking tool of all that I’ve used, but for some reason it hasn’t “stuck” with me. I think it’s because I know that I’d have to devote some time and energy to set it up properly so that I could use it to its fullest potential. Quite frankly, I’m a little too lazy to use it properly when I could just use StumbleUpon or Del.icio.us.
In fact, I rarely ever go back to my bookmarks to check them again, relying mostly on Google searches or the favorites functionality in my web browser.
This begs the question: is tagging and bookmarking really worth the trouble for tracking your own information? I’m starting to wonder if it is.
So, I’ll turn the question over to you. Do you use social bookmarking? If so, do you regularly create bookmarks? And how often do you go back to find something that you’ve saved in a social bookmarking program?
Why not leave a comment and share your thoughts?
Carsten Pötter:
I have realized that I find more relevant information on certain topics quicker by searching social bookmarking sites (I use Ma.gnolia, btw.). Of course, spam has found its way to those sites as well, but basically it’s information other people found worth bookmarking (including my own ones). So usually it’s better, filtered information than found by search engines.
Check out New Look from Carsten Pötter
26 May 2008, 3:22 amTad Chef:
Do not mistake StumbleUpon for social bookmarking. It’s social browsing, recommendation and discovery. So I strongly advise you not to submit stuff only matters to you o SU. In contrast del is just good for anything as it’s your won bookmarks. Nobody cares.
26 May 2008, 3:27 ambrainadmin:
@Carsten – what you’re saying does make a lot of sense, as long as the spam doesn’t overwhelm the good stuff. I get the feeling that a lot of people are self-submitting their own content to these sites, though, so you have to wonder if the tagging is really in their best interests instead of yours.
@Tad – I don’t see why you couldn’t mix your own interests in with what you think other people would like in StumbleUpon, but you do have a good point about the recommendation aspect of SU. However, del.icio.us in particular does have the popular bookmarks functionality, suggesting to me that there’s interest in what other people are submitting there, plus it seems to me that del.icio.us bookmarks have some kind of search engine/Google relevance that other bookmarks don’t have. Am I wrong about that?
26 May 2008, 5:44 amCarsten Pötter:
Yes, a lot of people submit their own articles to social news and social bookmarking sites. I’m still not sure if that’s ok or not; I don’t do it. However if the tagging is not misleading and there is real content it’s probably not much of a problem.
Check out New Look from Carsten Pötter
26 May 2008, 10:07 ambrainadmin:
@Carsten – actually, I’ve submitted my own stuff to bookmarking sites in the past, but over time I’ve severely cut back on doing so. However, if someone submits my stuff to a social news site or to StumbleUpon, then I’ll usually add a vote to it as well. I haven’t done a lot of social bookmarking submissions but it’s something that I think I’ll investigate further.
26 May 2008, 10:37 amDave:
Strangely, not being a power user, I find I can still go back and reference things many weeks later. I find that with not only bookmarking such as say Stumble, but on Sphinn as well. I ‘vote’ for things I enjoy in my travels so that I can come back to them as a referrence later on.
I find much of my social voting is like this, bookmarking or otherwise really…if you do a lot of voting for ‘friends’ then your items get poisoned – vote for only the things you actually enjoy, and your profiles should be full of good stuff.. oui?
2c
26 May 2008, 11:05 ambrainadmin:
@Dave – There’s no doubt that 50 bookmarks are easier to go back through than 500 or 2000 (just throwing out some numbers, no idea if they’re accurate). And yes, you do have to be conscious of the reasons why you are bookmarking or voting for stuff.
26 May 2008, 11:14 amShari:
I bookmark everything I want to come back to on Delicious. It’s so easy to use and I’m continually stumbling across new uses for it. It holds my raw ideas for future blog posts, my to-do list of directory and review sites, general reference information for business, health, and personal use. I make full use of the “do not share” checkbox for items that I have yet to write about or just wish to keep private. And yes, many times I refer to my Delicious bookmarks and those of my network before searching Google.
26 May 2008, 11:28 ambrainadmin:
@Shari – thanks for sharing that. The “do not share” checkbox is an excellent feature to point out.
26 May 2008, 11:46 amPaul:
Very good post about bookmarking, I to rarely ever use my book marks now! I am more into find out what everyone else is find than to go to my bookmarks. if it’s something I like, Hulu for example I’ll will remember it!!
Check out Phoenix EDL recap Lander Press Conference from Paul
26 May 2008, 11:55 ambrainadmin:
@Paul – for me it’s the less obvious stuff, with longer URLs or specific pages, to which bookmarking does provide some value.
26 May 2008, 12:02 pmPaul:
@Brainadmin You are correct but that doesn’t make it any less need. Now a days with Google and other SEO out there you really don’t need to remember a lot. Yes that does mean we are getting lazy, I know this truth all to well. People google search for my website just because google pops up on Firefox first!! LOL I think personal bookmarks are going away and social bookmarks are coming in!!
Check out Social Mythmarking on the Net from Paul
26 May 2008, 1:45 pmAlex Wiliams:
A shift is occurring but social bookmarking is also evolving. Structured tagging is helping social sites provide better organization for their users. For instance, Wesabe, a personal finance site, offers a form of structured tagging. They call it split tagging. A category always has a tag. A tag to mark an event has a one-time tag. Gene Smith highlighted this example in his excellent presentation on trends in tagging last week at WebVisions. He posted his slides on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/gsmith/tagging-emerging-trends
Check out Webvisions Stands Up There With The Big Guys from Alex Wiliams
26 May 2008, 2:05 pmbrainadmin:
@Alex – never heard of split tagging before. Thanks for the info.
26 May 2008, 2:36 pmKim Woodbridge:
I’m obsessive about bookmarking. I’ve been using delicious for a couple of years but have recently switched to diigo – and I use diigo to post to delicious and magnolia (for some reason I’ve never liked magnolia that much and it loads too slow for me) at the same time. I find, though, that except for a couple of tags I rarely go back to them and instead do a google search. I do find, however, that it is extremely useful to set up feeds for tags on topic that I am researching and feeds for users who have similar interests. So, hopefully my 3000+ bookmarks will be useful to others in the same way. It seems that my use of social bookmarking is not information retrieval but rather of information discovery.
Check out Streaming the Minutia of My Life from Kim Woodbridge
26 May 2008, 7:07 pmbrainadmin:
@Kim – you’re the second commenter to mention Diigo. I’ve tried it once in order to annotate an online document but I didn’t really play with the bookmarking piece. Interesting that you post to both delicious and magnolia.
26 May 2008, 7:28 pmnotes, thoughts, ideas and responses » Are You Getting The Most Out Of Social Bookmarking?:
[...] and not everyone uses these services to their fullest potential. Mark Dykeman of Broadcasting Brain proposes that social bookmarking is mainly used to direct other people to specific websites and not for [...]
26 May 2008, 11:17 pmHeidi @ Carolina Dreamz:
I’m slowly becoming a delicious junkie.
I know its because of my specialized Delicious Flock button, though. Its made life so much easier. I despise toolbars and yet still use them in a Karate Kid, on/off/ manner for SU.
Magnolia has/had issues with the Flock browser and I had to “forget” it to relieve myself of the constant errors. I don’t find it as convenient as Delicious, so I haven’t bothered to do much with it.
Magnolia has done some great CS on twitter, though. That was impressive.
27 May 2008, 8:29 ambrainadmin:
@Heidi – must check out what you’ve said about Magnolia
27 May 2008, 9:28 amKim Woodbridge:
@brainadmin – I rarely use the annotation feature of diigo although it is very useful. What I like about diigo are the social aspects. There are groups that you can join like Wordpress and Twitter and when you bookmark a site you can also send the link to that group. And anyone can create a group. There are many other features but this is the one that I use the most.
I crosspost to magolia, delicious and diigo as form of backup – sometimes I worry about all of my research being gone if a site were to disapear. I really wanted to like magnolia but it just doesn’t work for me.
27 May 2008, 12:33 pmbrainadmin:
@Kim – thanks for the additional info!
27 May 2008, 12:57 pmnotes, thoughts, ideas and responses » del.icio.us Hits Concept But Misses Innovation:
[...] does such a flexible service like del.icio.us go wrong? For starters, there are skeptics who question if tagging and social bookmarking is really worth the trouble for tracking your own [...]
20 June 2008, 12:29 am