Collaborative bookmarking
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Collaborative bookmarking extends social bookmarking into the business arena, with the addition of project groups to allow users to collaborate across boundaries. As a result, groups tend to maintain a common theme.
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[edit] History
Social bookmarking sprung mainly out from academic roots, and a personal desire to share links and bookmarks with like-minded individuals. Collaborative bookmarking springs predominantly from the organisational desire to glean information or knowledge from workers with the hope of storing and re-transmitting that knowledge to other workers, particularly at the time that the knowledge or information is needed.
[edit] Functional Overview
Initially users populate Internet resources (generally including links and files) into containers such as menus. These containers are maintained within different project groups, according to the area of work in which the user is working. Over time a large repository of high-quality human-filtered resources is constructed.
Systems then use intelligent collation logic to match results between pages and their internal database of stored links. This allows the system to deliver a dynamic, relevant set of results as users passively browse the World Wide Web.
It improves collaboration since results from the passive system are usually shared with all users within an organisation, not just project group, allowing cross-project collaboration. Collaborative bookmarking is as much about linking people together as it is about linking people to relevant web sites.
[edit] Advantages
Organizations, particularly large organizations, have problems with tracking the knowledge and skills of employees. Managing the mass of information available on the Internet and employees' access to it is extremely difficult. Collaborative bookmarking provides a simple way for users to group bookmarks together and then share these grouped links with colleagues. The groups of links saved by a person can be retrieved by another employee through many different routes. A related group can also be delivered to another user at the point of need, e.g. when they are looking for related information.
One of the major benefits of collaborative bookmarking systems is the passive manner in which most look-ups are performed. Since the software supplements a user's browsing experience, and is ever-present and always available, it receives much greater utility than other knowledge-management systems.
In addition, some Collaborative Bookmarking systems can integrate with an existing search system by passing search terms to the system. This can provide another set of results for consideration by the system, or directly to the user.
[edit] Disadvantages
Some systems do not aggregate results, and deliver large collections of links with minimal consideration. This largely stems from systems that draw results from multiple sources, and many duplications are delivered.
[edit] Public/Social Versions
Some Collaborative Bookmarking suppliers have introduced public versions of their software. In these scenarioes, collaboration can be performed between individuals and smaller businesses.
