Social bookmarking: an empirical analysis of connotea users’ perspectives

This study examined the perspectives of experienced and inexperienced users of Connotea in terms of reported bookmarking behaviors, perceived usefulness of social bookmarking in information discovery and management, and perceived usefulness of particular Connotea features. A convenience sample of experienced (n=30) and inexperienced users (n=32) responded to an online survey. The questionnaire utilized a 4-point Likert scale to examine the respondents’ opinions. The findings showed that both experienced and inexperienced users of Connotea perceived social bookmarking to be useful for information discovery and management. They also perceived the features and policies of Connotea to be useful for their personal purposes. However, the reported frequencies of usage indicated that the extent of use of social bookmarking may not be substantial. Experienced users were also found to use social bookmarking for managing relevant websites while inexperienced users still preferred to use traditional bookmarking in dedicated computers. These findings have potential implications on the development and use of social bookmarking services. Through our results, we provided information on the human factors that may be considered for further improvement of social bookmarking applications.published_or_final_versionThe 2010 CITE Research Symposium on 'e-Learning Design and Designs for Learning', the University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 4-6 March 2010

Content repositories and social networking : can there be synergies?

This paper details the novel application of Web 2.0 concepts to current services offered to Social Scientists by the ReDReSS project, carried out by the Centre for e-Science at Lancaster University. We detail plans to introduce Social Bookmarking and Social Networking concepts into the repository software developed by the project. This will result in the improved discovery of e-Science concepts and training to Social Scientists and allow for much improved linking of resources in the repository. We describe plans that use Social Networking and Social Bookmarking concepts, using Open Standards, which will promote collaboration between researchers by using information gathered on user’s use of the repository and information about the user. This will spark collaborations that would not normally be possible in the academic repository context

Soft peer review: social software and distributed scientific evaluation

The debate on the prospects of peer-review in the Internet age and the increasing criticism leveled against the dominant role of impact factor indicators are calling for new measurable criteria to assess scientific quality. Usage-based metrics offer a new avenue to scientific quality assessment but face the same risks as first generation search engines that used unreliable metrics (such as raw traffic data) to estimate content quality. In this article I analyze the contribution that social bookmarking systems can provide to the problem of usage-based metrics for scientific evaluation. I suggest that collaboratively aggregated metadata may help fill the gap between traditional citation-based criteria and raw usage factors. I submit that bottom-up, distributed evaluation models such as those afforded by social bookmarking will challenge more traditional quality assessment models in terms of coverage, efficiency and scalability. Services aggregating user-related quality indicators for online scientific content will come to occupy a key function in the scholarly communication system

Social bookmarking and tagging behavior: an empirical analysis on delicious and connotea

Social bookmarking services have shown themselves as common and popular Internet tools by successfully acquiring millions of users, with Delicious being one of the most popular social bookmarking services to the public. While Delicious is used mainly for general purposes, Connotea, another social bookmarking site that primarily serves academic and scientific interests, has become equally popular among researcher groups. This paper attempts to analyze and compare users’ bookmarking and tagging behavior in Connotea and Delicious. The results show that there is a distinctive difference in usage behavior among these two groups of users. Delicious users create bookmarks more frequently than Connotea users, but Connotea users tend to use more distinctive tags for their bookmarks than Delicious users. Moreover, our result from the analysis indicates that the number of bookmarks created is a significant predictor of the quantity of tags used. This study is a starting point from which to explore the reasons behind the difference in social bookmarking and tagging behavior among different usage orientation groups.postprintThe 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2009), Hong Kong, 3-4 December 2009. In Proceedings of the ICKM, 2009, p. 1-1

Exploiting Social Annotation for Automatic Resource Discovery

Information integration applications, such as mediators or mashups, that require access to information resources currently rely on users manually discovering and integrating them in the application. Manual resource discovery is a slow process, requiring the user to sift through results obtained via keyword-based search. Although search methods have advanced to include evidence from document contents, its metadata and the contents and link structure of the referring pages, they still do not adequately cover information sources -- often called ``the hidden Web''-- that dynamically generate documents in response to a query. The recently popular social bookmarking sites, which allow users to annotate and share metadata about various information sources, provide rich evidence for resource discovery. In this paper, we describe a probabilistic model of the user annotation process in a social bookmarking system del.icio.us. We then use the model to automatically find resources relevant to a particular information domain. Our experimental results on data obtained from \emph{del.icio.us} show this approach as a promising method for helping automate the resource discovery task.Comment: 6 pages, submitted to AAAI07 workshop on Information Integration on the We

Social bookmarking and tagging behavior: an empirical analysis on delicious and connotea

Social bookmarking services have shown themselves as common and popular Internet tools by successfully acquiring millions of users, with Delicious being one of the most popular social bookmarking services to the public. While Delicious is used mainly for general purposes, Connotea, another social bookmarking site that primarily serves academic and scientific interests, has become equally popular among researcher groups. This paper attempts to analyze and compare users’ bookmarking and tagging behavior in Connotea and Delicious. The results show that there is a distinctive difference in usage behavior among these two groups of users. Delicious users create bookmarks more frequently than Connotea users, but Connotea users tend to use more distinctive tags for their bookmarks than Delicious users. Moreover, our result from the analysis indicates that the number of bookmarks created is a significant predictor of the quantity of tags used. This study is a starting point from which to explore the reasons behind the difference in social bookmarking and tagging behavior among different usage orientation groups.postprintThe 6th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM 2009), Hong Kong, 3-4 December 2009. In Proceedings of the ICKM, 2009, p. 1-1

Reflective case study. My ‘Pinteresting’ project: Using Pinterest to increase student engagement, promote inclusivity and develop employability skills

This article will give an overview of my Pinterest project, outlining a rationale for using social bookmarking sites and specifically Pinterest. It will then outline the aims of my practice, linking to research and implementation by other educators, before describing the boards I have set up with visuals and finally evaluating its impact and looking forward to future possibilities for research

Social bookmarking et tags structurés

National audienceNous présentons dans cet article les enjeux du rapprochement entre les techniques du web participatif (Web 2.0) et du web sémantique. Nous expliquons ensuite les limites des outils actuels explorant cette piste mais qui, malgré l'emploi de tags, conservent une part de rigidité liée aux ontologies sous-jacentes employées. Nous décrivons finalement l'ajout à un outil de social bookmarking de trois fonctionnalités permettant la structuration progressive de tags par une communauté tout en respectant la souplesse des tags classiques

Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology’s adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of socio-cultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy makers. Instead, socio-cultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education