Scategories: The New/Old Social Bookmarking Tool

It was another warm night in the Okanagan and Tess and her friend Jordan, from Oz and I had set up two Canada Day emblazoned citronella candles to keep the no-see-ums away. We had moved the picnic table under the porch light of our little rinky-dinky motel room, and as the sun loafed its way over the last rounded pine-topped mountain, the challenge was heralded:

Let the games begin!

I already had been thoroughly thrashed at Snap, Aussie-style, and Tess totally dominated Dutch Blitz, so it was my turn to pick. Without a second of hesitation I shouted, Scategories!

Aha, this was my domain...words, categories, obscure references. I’ll show these Millennials what the old gal has stashed away over the years. As we set up the board under the flickering candlelight and as the blue-greying lake settled quietly to shore for the night, I had a sudden surge of panic...what if I couldn’t remember and retrieve all my hard-won store of trivia? What good is all that info if I can’t bring it home?

And so it is with my bookmarking. All those bookmark menu items, all those bookmark bar items, all those emails I send to myself are pretty much re-buried gold and I have lost my map.

The world of social bookmarking, according to YouTube and my classmates, is the recovered map for the mother lode. Does social bookmarking really help with web searches?

Yes they can help us remember an URL and the tags are like guide markers to useful content, but there is much more to consider…

Research
Activities like social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures.

This process allows like-minded individuals to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources. www.educause.edu/eli/ (2005)

This folksonomy-based tool for research lets ordinary users take advantage of the
intuition of other users to find information related to the topic you are researching, even in areas that aren’t obviously connected to the main topic.

I also discovered from the Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining (2008), that "social bookmarking can provide search data not currently provided by other sources, though it may currently lack the size and distribution of tags necessary to make a significant impact".

This comprehensive study explored the usefulness of the most popular social bookmarking tool, Delicious. This is what the authors discovered:

Advantages of Delicious

• The pages tagged tend to be current and updated. This is important, as it can be hard to tell how old a page is
• Tags tend to be accurate, useful, relevant and objective
• Although small now, if it continues to grow at its current rate Delicious eventually will be on a scale with the Web
• The user interfaces can recommend tags that are obscure
• It is effective as a small data source for brand new web usages as 12.5% of URLS are new, unindexed pages
• It is not highly reliant on a small group of users
• Overlapping tags tend to be accurate

Disadvantages of Delicious

• At the time of this conference in 2008, 120,000 URL’s are posted daily on Delicious but this represents only 1/10 of the number of daily blog posts so the scale of Delicious to the Web is fairly small
• Many tags are obvious; any good search engine would find the URLs
• There may be advantages in training librarians not users to tag; this is especially true in a specialized library

Implications for Teaching/Learning
Richardson (2006) contends that social bookmarking challenges us to rethink the way our students and we teachers treat the information we find. Traditionally, we emphasize keeping track of where our research comes from. In this new construct, it will become even more important to know how to retrieve it within the folksonomies created with our community of researchers.

Regardless of how you do it, the idea that we can now use social networks to tap into the work of others to support our own learning is an important concept to understand. It's another example of how the collective contributions created by the Web are changing the way we work and learn. (www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf).

My students for example, in social studies, could harvest data from very specific issues-based websites as they construct graphic and text presentations that present a perspective on a topic such as Fair Trade or Truth and Reconciliation.

Another consideration for teaching and learning is that tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to

change how we store and find information. It may become less
important to know and remember where information was found
and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework
created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social
bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies,
papers, and other resources among peers or students.

http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutSocia/156804

Additionally, one of our tasks as educators will be to inform students of the bias of social bookmarking reflecting the values of the community of users. Additionally “there is a risk of presenting a skewed view of the value of any particular topic. For example, users might assign pejorative tags to certain resources. “ www.educause.edu/eli/ (2005)

Finally, students will have to be taught that social bookmarking means storing data in yet another location that must be maintained and updated.

So I’m convinced enough to dip a toe into the waters of social bookmarking. It would be great for me to one-stop shop for marathon sites or dog breeds that are suited for running. For my photography student it would be a Godsend for tracking their favorite examples of the portfolio categories they must present.

As for my Scategories reprisal? It was postponed tonight on account of another session of wakeboarding. Like my students, I have conflicting interests and compelling reasons to heed the call of sun and water. I just hope I can construct a facsimile of Delicious from which to retrieve a model of an automobile that starts with ‘M”!










References

Lomas, C.(2005). Retrieved July 15, 2009 from http://www.educause.edu/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAboutSocia/156804

Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Search and Web Data Mining (2008). Palo Alto, California. Retrieved July 15, 2009, from http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1341531.1341558

Richarson, W. (2006). Retreived June 15, 2009, from http://www.techlearning.com/article/5464.