23 Things: The Third Tool = Blog Directories/More on Tagging

In my previous post on social bookmarking, I mentioned "tagging." This refers to the process of adding descriptive terms to online content, like a bookmark you save in del.icio.us, a photo you upload, or a post you contribute to a blog. When everyday language is used in tagging, it is referred to as a "folksonomy."

I use tags to describe posts in both of my blogs. In Forced Migration Current Awareness, I select tag terms from the International Thesaurus of Refugee Terminology. So these tags are the same as controlled subject terms used in library catalogs and many research databases. However, in this blog, Researching Refugees, the focus of the posts is on web technologies and therefore not adequately covered in the refugee thesaurus. So I employ folksonomy instead, i.e., everyday language that is better able to describe current concepts (like "blogs," "RSS," "social bookmarking," etc.).

Tags are a useful way to browse or search for relevant content. For example, you might want to see which of my blog posts relate to the "safety of humanitarian personnel." You can also use a blog search engine like Technorati to search tags across blogs; these are the results retrieved when I searched for posts tagged "refugees."

Not everyone uses tags to describe their blog posts, though. So if you want to find out which blogs have posted on forced migration issues or if you want to locate blogs whose main focus is forced migration, you can search Technorati more generally. Google Blog Search is another way to find relevant posts and/or blogs.

23 Things: The Second Tool = Social Bookmarks

The second tool discussed in the 23 Things program was del.icio.us. This service allows you to bookmark web sites/pages so that you have access to them from any computer. (As opposed to when you bookmark sites using Internet Explorer or another browser, you only have access to them from that individual computer.) del.icio.us is referred to as a social bookmarking site because you can also share your bookmarks with everyone or a selected audience. Moreover, you can search everyone's bookmarks and discover new resources. Finally, you can tag (i.e., provide a descriptive term for) the sites that you bookmark, and you can explore other people's bookmarks via their tags.

I can imagine using a bookmark tool like del.icio.us for very specific projects, like gathering bookmarks to respond to a particular reference query or when surveying what's available on a certain topic. See, for example, the list of bookmarks for forced migration-related working papers that I set up.

EADI's approach is to use del.icio.us for current awareness purposes. It bookmarks new publications and projects, adds a note indicating the publication date, publisher, and author, and tags each for inclusion with a series of topical categories. Plus users can subscribe to RSS feeds (these will be addressed in a later post) by topical category to be notified of new bookmarks. See EADI's migration and peace/conflict bookmarks.

Other forced migration/humanitarian sites have created more general lists, for resources they find useful or of interest. Examples include Paul Dudman's bookmarks (for the Refugee Archives at UEL) and Paul Currion's bookmarks (see his humanitarian.info blog).

Some organizations have jumped on the social bookmarking bandwagon simply by making it easier for visitors to create bookmarks for pages on their web sites. For instance, ICRC includes social bookmarking links on all news, article, information and other resource-specific pages.

Social bookmarking tools that are more geared to research and academics are on offer from CiteULike and Connotea. These services allow you to bookmark journal articles and scholarly papers. They extract the bibliographic details for citation purposes; all you have to do is add tags. And you can share your library of articles as well as check out other people's saved articles. So the next time you happen to be perusing an article abstract from Development in Practice, it will be easier to interpret the various bookmark symbols at the bottom of the page!