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Social bookmarking, tagging and pinging explained
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
You might have heard of social bookmarking, tagging and pinging, but if you're not sure what all those terms mean, Wikipedia says:
"Social bookmarking is ... where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed."
"Social bookmarking sites generally organize their content using tags. Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags."
"A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an item as means of classification by means of a folksonomy."
Example:
A web page hosted on a web server or blog server which supports tagging, might have the tags Baseball, Red Sox, Tickets, Away Games (tags can be more than one word), and Discounts. A human reader can probably tell the purpose of the page by quickly scanning the list of tags. Typically, the server would display the tags in a list on that page, with each tag displayed as a web link leading to an index page listing all web pages which use that tag. This allows a reader to locate quickly all pages which have been associated with the term Red Sox. If the server supports tag searching, a reader would be able to find all pages that use a particular set of tags, such as Red Sox and Tickets.
If the page's author wishes to reclassify the page, all that is required is for them to change the list of tags. In this case, the author could add the tags Blue Jays, and Paypal to their page. All connections between pages are automatically tracked and updated by the server software. There is no need to relocate the page within a complex hierarchy of categories.
Pinging is the process of letting different social bookmarking sites know that you have added tagged content to your website or blog.
See also - a list of 124 tagging sites and Changing Earth's example of inviting visitors to socially bookmark a website or webpage (look for the 'socialize' button in the right hand column).
Labels: internet
