Social Bookmarking Setbacks

Much has been said about social bookmarking and it has indeed changed the way how Internet users save their bookmarked Web pages and websites to their social bookmarking accounts, organize them, and share them with others. Thus, it allows Internet users easy access to their favorite sites. Users of a bookmarking site can also rate and comment on other users' submitted articles, blogs and bookmarks.

The bookmarks are organized using a tag-based system. In this kind of system, the users assign keyword or keywords to their bookmarks based on the content of a particular website or Web page. Because social bookmarking is primarily tag-based, users find it easier to find sites that are related to their field of interest or expertise or for resources for their research. When they enter a keyword in the search bar of a social bookmarking site, the results shown are more targeted and specific when compared to the popular and huge search engines.

However, it is also in this tag-based system where social bookmarking suffers a major setback. In this kind of system, no standards are set for the keywords and vocabulary used. The users assign these keywords to their own free will, and other users can just intentionally use false keywords, which can create confusion to the users. And, even if we take out the people who falsely assign keywords from the picture, confusion can still occur. For instance, you bookmarked a website about airplanes. You tag it with airplanes, fly, planes, etc. Then I am looking for resources on planes, so I enter “planes” on the search bar. However, the “planes” I am referring to are not the planes in relation to airplanes, but planes used as a mathematical term. Because of this, I can be led to the airplane site that you have bookmarked when what I need is a site that is related to geometry or mathematics.

Furthermore, this tag-based system do not impose standards with regard to basic things such as capitalization, spelling, singular and plural and other similar issues, hence, mistagging is very likely to take place. Again, this causes confusion for the researchers.

Despite the setbacks, however, credit should be given to users who assign keywords properly and intelligently. And, this is what social bookmarking should be about: the coming together of Internet users into one community discriminate whether a website is interesting, fun and useful or not.