Social Bookmarking: iHCPL Week 6 #13

Back in the days of carved stone tablets and wooden spears, the FlipFlopLibrarian learned about a fancy new service called Hotlinks. This service allowed someone to create a free online account to save internet bookmarks. Previously, one saved all bookmarks to a file on a computer. If these bookmarks were needed on another computer, they had to be saved to a disk and then transferred to that other computer. This was not very efficient for people who worked at multiple computers.

Enter Hotlinks – a snazzy, web-based bookmarking service. From ANY computer, someone could access his or her bookmarks and add to them or delete them. This was truly revolutionary!

Hotlinks doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s something just as wonderful out there – del.icio.us! No, we’re not talking about some yummy new dish – we’re talking about a fabulous service that allows someone to save websites in their own online directory and share their saved websites with others.

FFL uses her del.icio.us account to save links to all the fabulous web finds she comes across. She tags each site with something to identify it so that she can find it again later. She doesn’t really use the social aspect to it – she finds plenty of sites on topics of interest through her favorite blogs and newsfeeds. But she can see how someone else might find that aspect interesting.

Her beef is that because of the folksonomy aspect to it, there is no consistent labeling of bookmarks. What the FFL may call “travel” another user may call “travelling” or “vacations.” Of course, we can’t all have a cataloging librarian sitting next to us while we peruse the Internet, but maybe we should! The world would be a much tidier place and people wouldn’t be sticking their bookmarks in messy random categories!

Toodle-oo!