Social Brand Visibility: BibSonomy

Many sites are actively advertising in search engines for the most valuable search queries. This high level of competition tends to result in high advertising costs which make it difficult to find attractive advertising opportunities. Resource sharing provides new ways of organizing and sharing information on the web and provides advertisers with another way for Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

BibSonomy is a social bookmarking system that allows users to bookmark and share their favorite sites and publication in a collaborative manner.

The bookmarking is easy, just as it is done on the regular browser, but it saves all the bookmarks to the BibSonomy site, which enables accessed from any computer. Users tag their ‘finds’ and can look at what others have tagged and viewed, in a social networking manner.

The uniqueness of BibSonomy is that it goes further than just being a social bookmarking system. It allows for publication sharing. It is what they call ”A team oriented publication management”.

It offers users the ability to store and organize their publications and supports exchange and integration of different people by offering a social platform for literature exchange.

Both bookmarks and publication can be tagged to help find information. A description can be freely chosen. The assignment of tags from different users creates a new vocabulary called ‘folksonomy’. It evolves from the participants of research groups, individual users and learning communities organizing their information needs. Folksonomies became popular on the web in 2004 as part of social software applications. The word is a mix of the words “taxonomy” and “folk” and allows an intuitive structure for navigating the data.

Developed by a team of students and scientists at the “Institute of Knowledge and Data Engineering” and is hosted by the University of Kassel in Germany.

While about 55% of visitors to the site come from India, it is also popular in the Philippines. The use of this site in the United States is at about 8% only, but is growing rapidly.