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Introduction
Social bookmarking involves collecting and tagging links that you've visited and sharing those links with others, often with a note summarizing the link.Tagging involves a skill that many technical writers are familiar with - determining which keywords best describe a link or image for retrieval later. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg.com use tagging, or keywords, to help users find their links later or group them into categories. What is more advanced and social about tagging is that you can usually see the tags that others use, and also see the content that they've tagged.
Tagging is a little more chaotic and less organized that the indexing that help authors and user assistance designers are accustomed to, so it might take some time to adjust your expectations. For example, your company style guide might mandate that the gerund form of a verb is always required, or that plurals should be preferred keyword forms. But with tagging, any word or term is allowed, and sometimes the terms don't match - work and working are one example of such tag mismatch.
The collective set of tags is known as a folksonomy - a taxonomy created by everyday folks. Where taxonomies are strict and rigid, a folksonomy is flexible and allows for any term. Both are powerful. Tag clouds are a visual method of displaying tags that are used most often. Tag clouds use a larger font size or bold to indicate which terms are used for more content. Or, alternatively, some tag clouds could show the most popular terms based on recency of that tag being used.
Popular examples of social bookmarking sites. There are literally hundreds of sites, but these sites represent communities that may be useful to technical communication.
del.icio.us
digg.com
writerriver.com
Here's a great video from Common Craft that explains, clearly, what is a social network....
Longer list of social bookmarking sites
- blogmarks
- Fark
- Blogter.hu
- co.mments
- De.lirio.us
- del.icio.us
- digg
- Fleck
- feedmelinks
- internetmedia.hu
- Ma.gnolia
- myShare
- YahooMyWeb
- PopCurrent
- Slashdot
- Smarking
- Taggly
- TailRank
- Technorati
- Wists
- Wists
- BlinkBits
- BlinkList
- BlogLines
- BlogMemes
- Bumpzee
- connotea
- donetKicks
- DZone
- Furl
- Google Bookmarks
- GWar
- HemiDemi
- IndiaGram
- IndianPad
- LinkaGoGo
- Linkter.hu
- Mister Wong
- Netscape
- Netvouz
- NewsVine
- PlugIM
- PPNow
- RawSugar
- scoopeo
- scuttle
- Shadows
- Simpy
- sphere
- Spurl
- StumbleUpon
- syxt
- Technorati Cosmos
- ThisNext
Aggregators
These sites include widgets that you can add to your content to allow visitors to add your site to their social network.- Add This
{ADDTHIS()}{ADDTHIS}
Explanation
We should add an explanation next to each of the links above to describe the type of social service they provide.For example:
- Flickr and PhotoBucket are social for sharing photos
- LinkedIn and Xing are social for sharing professional links
- digg,del.icio.us, Diigo, reddit, stumbleupon, buzz.yahoo.com are social for sharing news items (RSS feeds)
- Facebook and MySpace are social for sharing friends and ideas that can serve as inspiration for http://www.bestessays.ca.
- slideshare is social for sharing presentations
- Wikipedia & humanbraincloud are social for sharing knowledge
- YouTube is social for sharing videos
And there are more we should add:
- friendfeed
- plurk
- netvibes
- Mixx
- Identi.ca
{SUBMIT()}{SUBMIT}
