[Updated August 12, 2008: Added link to Kyle James's coverage of this topic
Updated August 22, 2008: Added link to Microsoft's new social bookmarking site]
We all know about online social networking by now. As the practice gains visibility by word of mouth and through the media, other online social phenomena are getting exposure as well.
You may hear people talking about their social graph.
You will hear general references to social media.
And you will increasingly see and hear about social bookmarking. The most ubiquitous tool for this practice is a site called Delicious Bookmarks (until recently it had the unwieldy name Del.icio.us.com, which probably curbed its popularity).
What does it do? Simple: it does two very useful things. Social bookmarking...
- allows you to share bookmarks with your contacts, colleagues and friends; and
- makes it easy for people to find interesting bookmarks through labels, or "tags."
When you find a web page that you want to remember, or that others might find useful or interesting, instead of just adding it to your web browser's bookmarks (which only you can see), you might choose to add it to your Delicious profile.
Then you tag it with keywords that will lead like-minded web-searchers to it without having to click through a lot of Google search results.
For example, the other day I came across an interesting article and with one click of the Delicious toolbar widget in Firefox, I added it to the list of Alumni Futures' bookmarks on Delicious.com.
If you didn't happen to see that article (and if I hadn't mentioned it here), you might never see it. Unless, that is, you subscribed to my bookmarks (or saw them in my Facebook profile, where they are published as part of the mini-feed). If you do subscribe, you'll be notified whenever I've added something I think is interesting and that relates to the scope and purpose of Alumni Futures.
Question: Is this kind of social bookmarking of use in higher ed advancement?
I think it depends on how effectively users of Delicious other social bookmarking sites tag their entries. A useful tag will tell others what general utility or relevance the site has for you.
But tagging is fraught with problems. Mashable's Chris Miller rightly points out that tags are a blessing and a curse:
Tagging is an art; a skill; and a dream. No one really gets trained in tagging and most companies never build a starter taxonomy kit properly. You end up with random misspellings, abbreviations and merged or underscored word sets everywhere.
With that in mind, Alumni Futures reader Paul O'Nolan (London, UK) recommends a standard tag for Delicious users to apply whenever a link or bookmark has value to alumni relations professionals.
The tag is, simply: alumnirelations.
Use it. I've already labeled a few of my own Delicious bookmarks with the alumnirelations tag.
And although Chris Miller overstates some of the problems with social bookmarking, he's right to admonish others to
- spell carefully,
- be consistent, and
- be thorough.
The more tags you use to label a single bookmark, the better it is for others. Using proper tags can make or break a set of shared bookmarks, and by extension, the entire practice.
In the future I'll write about using social bookmarks as a service for alumni.
Meanwhile, these links may prove useful to you :
Kyle James's excellent posting about Delicious Bookmarks from February 2008
125 Social Bookmarking Sites (and commentary on the importance of user-generated tags)
My bookmarks on Delicious.com (you can subscribe via RSS)
Good explanation of the social graph from Jeremiah Owyang's blog
MSDN: Microsoft's foray into social bookmarking — in preview/beta