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grassroots approach is referred to as a folksonomy or as social bookmarking or tagging.
The advantage of this third option is that metadata is created by the collectivity of
users. All users should more readily understand the tags or data about data, not just
their creators.
Social bookmarking is a method whereby users participate directly in the storage,
organization, searching, and managing of web resources. One way is by saving
personal bookmarks on a publicly accessible web site and then tagging these sites
with your own metadata. Early sites include: del.icio.us (http://www.delicious.com),
Furl (http://www.furl.net/), web page bookmarking sites, and Citeulike (http://www
.citeulike.org/), a social citation site for scholarly publications. Other users can then
view the bookmarks by category, search by key word or use other attributes. Users
make use of informal tags instead of more formal cataloguing methods. Since all the
tags originate from the intended end users, they are easier to understand than more
standardized or top-down indexing terms. The major drawback is this very lack of
standardization. There is no controlled vocabulary, that is, a list of standard keywords.
So many errors can occur due to misspelling, synonym confusion, tags with more than
one meaning, or tags that are too personalized. This situation brings us right back to
the problem faced by more traditional cataloguing approaches: How to tag so that
others can understand your tags?
In a KM context, social bookmarking makes it possible to share knowledge with
others in a new way by sharing not only the original knowledge but also what you
think about it (the metadata). The technology is easy to use with hardly any learning
curve to speak of. The real potential lies in what the metadata can be used for. For
example, if the knowledge resource (data) is a best practice, then the metadata (data
about data) can include annotations about what others think of the best practice,
testimonials, cautionary notes (when not to apply and why), and other contextual
information that can greatly increase the successful use and reuse (application) of this
knowledge. Social bookmarking is an excellent vehicle to peer-to-peer knowledge
sharing and may play a greater role in future communities of practice. In a given
community of practice (CoP), there is, in addition to a shared purpose and a shared
repository, a shared vocabulary. Since CoP members share the same jargon, tagging is
less likely to be a problem. Tagging for yourself should approximate tagging for your
peers, who are neither unknown nor unanticipated users.
As social bookmarking sites mature and ever-increasing numbers of users participate
in them, it becomes possible to see some patterns emerging with respect to the tags
that are most commonly used. This tag “ cloud ” can be found by looking at the right-