Bootstrap Bookmarks
Bijoy Goswami asked me to add social bookmarking blogware to the Bootstrap Austin blog, then write an explanation for the Bootstrap community. Here’s an excerpt:
Brewster Kahle used to talk about the Internet as a huge book that everyone was collaboratively writing, and in that spirit, we adopted early on the metaphor of “bookmarking” to note online addresses we might return to for whatever reason. Bookmarking was crucial to evolving browser navigation, and soon enough we had web sites where we could store bookmarks. A site called del.icio.ous gave us a way to categorize bookmarks with simple tags. Any user of the system could create a personal set of tags – roll your own taxonomy. So why not share tags and bookmarks with others? That’s the concept of social bookmarking, shared sites, navigation, and bottom-up taxonomies or “folksonomies.” Social bookmarking became a popular way to share content, and to “vote” with your feet – using algorithms that rate content by the number of bookmarks and the number of links. This is all part of the evolution of a web-facilitated mediasphere where the line between content producer and content consumer is blurred, and crowds collaborate in making and extending stories and knowledge.We can facilitate the social bookmarking of our own content by adding “blogware” that makes it easy to bookmark a site at one of the many social bookmarking and collaborative content sites that have appeared.
