What's Different about Social Bookmarking on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression

John Martin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:11:00 GMT

Quite a few in the blogosphere have noticed our Social Bookmarking Preview (thanks!) but some have also commented that it doesn't really offer anything new or different to the "space."

A few thoughts on that (kind of long ones, sorry)...

The difference between our approach and the approach of other social bookmarking providers becomes more clear when you look at Social Bookmarks not as a stand-alone experience, but as one feature of a larger integrated community site (i.e., MSDN or TechNet) powered by a single Social Platform.

When you look at it that way...

Bookmarking and tagging will be baked into the entire site experience. You can see tagging in a lot of places on our sites today, including the MSDN and TechNet Libraries, Codeplex, MSDN Code Gallery, and our new Forums application. When you tag a Library page or Forum thread, you are actually bookmarking the object and applying a tag. With Social Bookmarks, a URL is just another object to which you can apply a tag. The fact that tagging “stuff” – whether it’s a forum thread or a URL – is technically the same, makes it easy for us to integrate all the things on our sites that have been tagged. And the more tagged objects you have, the more powerfully you can describe, organize, filter, and display information on the sites. Jeff Day has a good blog post on this. Also see the new social feeds on MSDN.

So, why should you care? Our bookmarking actually supports "inline bookmarking" (see Forums) for easy tagging of on-site content and customers can manage tagged on-site content and off-site content (Social Bookmarks) together in one place - My Bookmarks. It also means we can build rich feeds of "related content" of all kinds (based on tags) and make those feeds available in key places like our Developer Centers on MSDN and TechCenters on TechNet (better faster discoverability).

As a part of our Social Platform, tagging on-site content and social bookmarking will be integrated into our Recognition System - the same system that awards points and medals for asking and answering questions in Forums.

So, why should you care? Using our bookmarking and tagging, customers will get credit or recognition within the technical community for their contributions (more Return for the Investment of bookmarking). Looking at it the other way, seeing a popular item bookmarked on an a site like Delicious may be helpful, but how differently would you think about that bookmark if you saw it was provided by a highly-rated Microsoft MVP?

Finally, unlike most dedicated social bookmarking sites, the community of bookmarkers and taggers on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression Social Bookmarks will be almost entirely made up of technical professionals, all interested in some way and to one degree or another, in learning about, using, and succeeding with Microsoft products and technologies. Simply put, when you look at the All Bookmarks view, you're seeing things that have been bookmarked by other people in your field.

So, why should you care? The focus and depth of the technical community on our sites increases the relevance of the bookmarks in the system and the value of the connections you might create with other bookmarkers.

I hope this helps provide more clarity into what we are doing with social bookmakring on the sites. As our team gets beyond the preview, we will be integrating bookmarking and tagging more fully into the sites and you should see what I'm talking about above become a reality.

John Martin's Blog : Tagging

What's Different about Social Bookmarking on MSDN, TechNet, and Expression