Social Bookmarking vs Traditional Classification?

My experience this term with del.icio.us (delicious) has been my first exposure to social bookmarking. This week’s articles provided me with a clearer understanding of what this new electronic phenomenon is all about. The Wikipedia article provided a great background for the more in-depth concepts covered in the other articles. One thing (of many) that I did not know about social bookmarking is that you can subscribe to RSS feeds on tags, bundles or even specific users’ bookmarks. This would certainly be useful in the research community. As Mercado suggests, if you find a user that has similar interests and levels of interest, subscribing to that feed would prove beneficial. Hammond et al give many good suggestions as to how social bookmarking can be used for research purposes. In particular, I think it is great that services like Connotea and CiteULike allow you to send your references directly to a reference manager. One of the frustrating issues with using social bookmarking for research purposes would be the lack of consistency in tags. Because users create your own tags, one can never be certain that access to online information is comprehensive for research interests.

After reading about it in several articles, I understand the difference between the concept of social bookmarking and folksonomy. I enjoyed reading the rhetoric on the different terms (folksonomy, ethnoclassification etc) in Mathe’s article.

Most of the authors that will admit to weakness in social bookmarking identify the following:

1. no standard set of keywords
2. no standard for structure (singular vs plural, capitalization, single or multiple term tags)
3. no hierarchy
4. problem of synonyms
5. highly personalized tags (me, toread, wishlist from Mathes)
6. mistagging (spelling errors)

Even within my own tagging, I have noticed inconsistencies with capitalization and pluralization which have led to problems of collocation. Writers claim that some of these weakness will be corrected through the emergence of a folksonomy (as seen in tag clouds) and in tag bundles. While I can understand this thinking, I agree with Mathes who says that “it would be impossible to get the users of these systems to use a complex, hierarchical, controlled vocabulary. The barriers are simply too high.” However, I liked Pind’s ideas for improving tags. Furthermore, extensions such as foxylicious and nutritious as described by Hollenback seem to go a long way to make the whole process of social bookmarking more structured and sensical. Of course, such advances are only effective if the masses use them.

Of course, there are many identified strengths of social bookmarking as well. The authors seem to agree on the following:

1. Cheaper than traditional classification methods
2. Faster than traditional classification methods
3. More flexible than traditional classification methods
4. Viable option for classifying web
5. Provides personal benefit as well as community benefit
6. Makes measuring impact of sites easier
7. Tags are ‘user-generated vocabulary

Considering the above strengths and weaknesses, I do not agree with Porter’s blanket statement: "If users could tag their own bookmarks and navigate to them through a direct tag-based interface, then there was really no need for an overarching, expert-developed taxonomy." Such an assessment seems extreme and pre-mature for a technology that is relatively new, even in electronic terms. Happily, it does not seem that advocates of social bookmarking generally recommend that social bookmarking replace conventional classification methods. Mercado notes: “Jessamyn was very careful to note that she is *not* promoting the abandonement of cataloging and classification in favor of the relative anarchy of tagging. It's more of a supplemental tool, to enhance what you already have.” While I can definitely see the worth of this new social software, I do not believe that it is, or ever will be an adequate replacement of regular subject analysis and traditional classification schemes.

That said, when doing this week’s readings, I couldn’t help but think that such an approach to “classifying” (or categorizing according to Mathe) is the only viable option when it comes to web content. Clearly libraries cannot attempt to classify the entire web. Furthermore, if they decide to classify certain websites for their patron community, they will inevitably miss many key sites that are important to their users. Mathes agrees that traditional approaches to cataloguing are insufficient in the web environment: “This makes it very difficult to scale and keep up with the vast amounts of new content being produced, especially in new mediums like the World Wide Web.” Therefore it seems that social bookmarking is the next best workaround. The benefits that it brings, albeit different, certainly would be comparable to the benefits of regular classification. In all, I don’t think that traditional classification and social bookmarking should be “pitted against” each other. Each has its advantages, disadvantages and rightful place in the sphere of information and its organization, access and use, and should be used to complement rather than replace one another. Hammond et al. support this notion: "Rather, this is an altogether different – and, we would argue, complementary – form of classification."

"In addition, if Del.icio.us could aggregate the bookmarks over all users, they could come up with a folksonomy for everybody, based on how the total population actually valued and referred to the content." (Porter)

While the notion that a collective folksonomy will one day emerge to become a new form of classification sounds grand, I personally do not think that such a system could ever replace conventional systems of classification because of its inherent weaknesses mentioned above. However, Mercado raises a somewhat less ambitious—and more realistic—point; she suggests that user tagging provides “an opportunity to observe a user-based classification, and learn what your users think your data is about, and possibly using that to your advantage to, say, improve your classification, or study how the patron mind works.”