At its simplest, social bookmarking is nothing more than a shared web page linking resource. If there’s a website you like to use, a social bookmark lets you share your online gem with others who might like it as well.

To make the most of social bookmarking in an organisation, you will also need to categorise and tag the bookmarks, so that your users can search them efficiently. This moves social bookmarks further away from the traditional in-browser bookmarking model, which tends to follow a hierarchical folder structure for categorisation. The more advanced social bookmarking services ­ and you must think in Web 2.0 interactive service terms rather than static software tools ­ will be able to create clusters of links based around the relationships between certain tags.

Culture of collaboration

Web 2.0 culture pervades every aspect of social bookmarking, right down to enabling the bookmarks to come to you rather than you having to hunt them down. By introducing RSS feeds of bookmark lists, organised by tags, date, owner and so on, you can have the latest relevant bookmarks delivered automatically to your desktop.

While the overwhelming driving force behind social bookmarking is the ability to both share and discover, it is not the be all and end all. If you don’t want to share your bookmarks with just anyone, there are what might be called unsocial bookmarking systems, which let you restrict access to specific named contact groups, networks, or even a combination of open and restricted flagging within the same bookmark sets.

Misanthropic attitudes to bookmarking are rare and most people who have embraced the technology of social bookmarks will equally embrace the community culture behind them. This includes the ability to comment on the bookmarks other people have tagged, and rate them so that the most popular rise to prominence.

By bringing the wisdom of crowds to your browser bookmarks, you can be sure of always having access to the best websites without wasting hours trawling through the trash to find them.

A logical question to ask is why not just use a search engine to find the web pages that cover the specific topics you are interested in? The answer is that search engines use fully automated spidering tools to discover and classify pages while crawling the web. This works well at returning myriad pages for any given term, but is pretty poor at sorting the wheat from the chaff.

How many times have you performed a web search and, after visiting the first 20 pages and wasted 20 minutes, got no closer to finding one that is actually any good? By replacing the software-generated classification with a wholly human-generated system of tagging, so that context and content can be understood at a glance, a semantic web of bookmarked sites is created.

More to the point, rather than ranking the position of a page within a search engine list by the number of external websites that link to it, or some other highly complex algorithmic basis, applying a simple metric such as “perceived utility” is far and away more accurate. That said, it is possible for tagging to be abused, either in error or deliberately, and for rankings to be manipulated by the concerted effort of a relatively small number of people. But while the system is not perfect, it is preferable to the cold, machine-driven version.

The services

Del.icio.us, part of the Yahoo empire, continues to be the market leader in social bo okmarking, although with StumbleUpon recently acquired by eBay that could soon change.

Indeed, while Del.icio.us has an estimated user base of about three million, StumbleUpon claims 3.5 million users, or stumblers, as it refers to them. Both reference well in excess of 100 million web pages. Mag.nolia and Furl cannot claim such extravagant membership figures; according to the Social Bookmarking Face-off study (http://alexiskold.wordpress.com), the figures are less than 100,000 and 50,000, respectively.

Del.icio.us

Like most social bookmarking sites, Del.icio.us is free to use, although it does require registration. Importing a browser bookmark folder is easy, although by default it will translate your folder names into tags, which means you’ll probably want to do a bit of editing to tidy your semantic tags up.

Adding new bookmarks is as simple as clicking a button within your links toolbar. Not the prettiest of interfaces, Del.icio.us has built a reputation for usability and fitness for purpose rather than flashy front ends and is all the better for it. You get a site that loads quickly and a service that works as you would like, right down to auto-completing tags if they already exist in its database. And with 100 million pages already tagged, the chances are they will be.

The most popular tags area is always listed. One click and a whole new world of web navigation opens in front of your eyes. And the addition of a basic but well-implemented search facility rounds things off nicely.

If you don’t want to share your finds, just use the service as an online bookmark storage vault for your own use. If you do share, then you can specify content rights, such as a creative commons licence or the reservation of all rights, to apply to your bookmark feed to prevent abuse by others who might just cut and paste your listings in their blog or web page. There is no way just to randomly browse a category by following the suggestions of fellow members ­ as there is in StumbleUpon, for example ­ but for sheer ease of use and simplicity, Del.icio.us is hard to beat.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon takes a toolbar approach, mixing social bookmarking with what was, for a while, a unique social surfing concept. Click on the Stumble button and it serves up a random website from those pages that have either been recommended as worthy from within a social network, or from other users who share similar interests to you.

It’s a great concept because the more you use it the more refined it becomes, and the more relevant the sites served are to your interests. It is a novel take on the social bookmarking genre, and one that works really well. Simply create a profile that flags your interests and start marking sites with either a thumbs up or thumbs down as you visit them.

Tagging is, however, limited to choosing a category from an admittedly long drop-down list, but this is restrictive and often nothing fits as precisely as you would like. This makes finding specific content more difficult than with more granular bookmarking services.

You can include a brief review of the page in question, and are positively encouraged to do so. You are also encouraged to flag it if the page contains adult content or nudity so that stumblers can filter this out by choosing a No Adult Content option on the toolbar.

StumbleUpon is a great social networking site. Search on a subject and you discover other people who share that interest and sites that cover it. However, as a dedicated social bookmarking tool with the focus on a research function it falls short.

Ma.gnolia

Ma.gnolia has a very attractive interface, but it’s more than just a pretty face. There’s no ignoring the thumbnail screenshot of almost every page you bookmark. There is nothing empty about the amount of metadata that Ma.gnolia stores ­ everything from descriptive tags and titles, through to the hugely useful, and often overlooked, matter of the date the link was last updated.

Like StumbleUpon, it has a strong social networking focus, with well-implemented group functionality. It allows users to gather around a collection of bookmarks, either by way of project collaboration or just hanging with interested friends.
The ability for a group manager to decide whether content is visible to all, or group members only, is a nice touch, meaning that the details of a bookmark in a group and the same one in your general collection can be totally different, enabling different ratings within each context.

Equally useful is the copy of every web page you bookmark, which Ma.gnolia saves. It provides a cached copy for future reference, even if the original becomes unavailable for whatever reason. With complete tagging, and auto-complete tagging for that matter, easy-to-use tag clouds for general interest browsing and a very competent search function, Ma.gnolia ticks pretty much every box.

Furl

The name says what it does ­ Files URL (Furl) ­ but it doesn’t describe the depths to which Furl does so. In essence, the tool offers you 5GB of storage for your bookmarks, which are more structured in nature than Del.icio.us, but without the graphical user interface niceties of Ma.gnolia.

Ratings, notation and tagging are all supported, as is the archiving of the pages you bookmark in the same way as Ma.gnolia. By providing full text searching of your bookmark archive, along with tagging, page Furl makes retrieval as quick as it is easy. For copyright reasons, you can only access saved copies of pages you have bookmarked yourself, which slows things down if you have not bookmarked the site in question.

Indeed, if it has disappeared then being linked directly to the URL will not be much use to you. The Furl search engine is one of the best here, and the sharing functionality is well implemented as well.

A good thing

A folksonomy research tool for web page bookmarking always held the promise of being a good thing, and the promise has largely been delivered. There is no doubt that bringing the wisdom of crowds into the bookmarking process, and allowing communities of content to be created, helps to filter out much of the rubbish that consumer search engines throw your way.

But it’s not all rosy in the social bookmarking garden, because those content communities are created mainly by amateurs rather than information professionals, so the quality of the tagging, and therefore the reliability of the resource, must always be considered.