Pieces of me on community... : tagging

Social Bookmarks v1 released

b2ix — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 19:11:00 GMT

A few months ago we previewed a version of Social Bookmarks that enabled technical professionals to:

store urls of interest to you
share them with others
explore what others share

Now we're ready to open it up even more. With the new release of Social Bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression new scenarios are enabled:

Follow a person's bookmarks -- follow a bookmark feed of a specific person or a bookmark feed of a person by tag. Put another way, this is tag drafting
Bookmark on sites you own -- use our Social Bookmarks widget (English language for now, other languages in the weeks ahead) to make it easier for others to save your page as a bookmark
Support for 11 new languages -- all to be rolled out in the next several weeks -- Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Czech, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
Import existing links -- from your browser favorites or from Delicious
Browse other users -- see who else is bookmarking and follow their feed of bookmarks
Report a bookmark -- if you see a bookmark that you believe to be questionable, report the item to Microsoft for review

We would not be here were it not for your feedback, and for the work of an incredible engineering team. Thank you! Congratulations to all involved! Now get out there and bookmark :-)

Organize your life (or at least your favorite urls) with Social Bookmarks

b2ix — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:58:00 GMT

While browser favorites, or bookmarks, can help people find the web sites they need, many websites are not easily categorized into the folder model common with browser bookmarks. If this situation sounds familiar to you, then Social Bookmarks can help.

Social Bookmarks present a new way for you to store and organize urls of pages you find interesting. Rather than selecting one folder in which a url shall appear in, you can now associate multiple words (or tags) with that url. Each tag essentially serves as a folder for that url, and there is no limit to the number of folders in which the website appears.

You can also add a brief description about that url for future reference. Just think how much easier it will be to find the resources you find interesting in that extended brain of ours we call the Internet.

An added bonus with the description -- if you don't want to type your own description, you can highlight the text on the page you wish to save, and it will be automatically added to the description of that bookmark.

For more information on how to save a bookmark, and organize your list of bookmarks check out the following video.

Video: Social Bookmarks - Part II

Social Bookmarks Preview for MSDN, TechNet and Expression!

b2ix — Wed, 28 May 2008 03:00:00 GMT

I'm pleased to announce that we are now in the official Preview of Social Bookmarks on MSDN, TechNet and Expression. For the last few months, I've been working with a great team of folks on point for creating the Social Bookmarks experience.

http://social.microsoft.com/bookmarks
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/bookmarks
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/bookmarks
http://social.expression.microsoft.com/bookmarks

What exactly are Social Bookmarks? Simply put, Social Bookmarks enable you to:

Store urls of interest to you
Share them with others
Explore what others share

I'll dive into these in more detail, but in the mean time, if you haven't already done so, I encourage you to check it out. Our "Getting Started" page has a lot more information along with some video walk-throughs.

Caveat -- this is still in preview mode, so there's still more work to be done. Should you have any feedback, please let us know!

You may also be interested in these related posts on Social Bookmarks from others on the team

Broadening the base

b2ix — Tue, 01 May 2007 20:55:00 GMT

Sean O'Driscoll has a great post critiquing a recent Reuters article about allegedly low participation rates in Web 2.0 communities.

Sean outlines what he refers to as the thick contributors (video contributors, for example) vs the thin contributors (taggers, voters, etc). I couldn't agree more with his assessment.

Partly, we in this community space online are partly to blame. Not having the proper tools or consistent measurements in place all these years leads in part to the singular, and perhaps inflated, value of thick contributors. Don't get me wrong, the participation of these contributors is crucial to a healthy and vibrant community. However, I would also assert that the contributions of the so called thin contributor is just as important, if not more so.

Thankfully, the technology and the measurements are catching up to the social norms. With tagging becoming an integral part of our new blog and forum solutions, in addition to the introduction of xClaims, there will be even more ways for people to participate. Think of it as broadening the breadth of participation at all different levels of engagement and contribution.

(originally xposted on my beta blog)