Early work on Social Bookmarking

I just dug out this early work on social bookmarking and social indexing:

Wittenburg, K., D. Das, L. Stead, and W. Hill (1995) Group Asynchronous
Browsing on the World Wide Web. In Proceedings of Fourth International
World Wide Web Conference, Boston, MA., December 11-14, 1995, pp. 51-62.
http://www.w3.org/Conferences/WWW4/Papers/98/

key points:

- The obvious move for providing access to personal or general subject-oriented indices is to manually or automatically collect them into a database and then provide query or browse capabilities over this database.

- we have created a server that collects and merges bookmark/hotlist files of participating users and then can serve (subsets) of these merged bookmark files to either standard HTML client browsers or to a client built with the multiscale visualization tool Pad++.

- we have included one general purpose subject guide in our initial experiments as well, namely, Yahoo [18], whose role we will subsequently explain. Such a database combined with a World Wide Web server, which we call a Group Asynchronous Browsing (GAB) server, can then provide access to a merged subject tree structure in various ways. This collection of tools is intended to address the issue of how to utilize the browsing activities of others to discover resources, some of which themselves may be guides to further World Wide Web resources.

- The essential point to note with respect to information discovery is that, starting from some particular resource, new resources that have a good chance of being similar to it may be discovered by navigating "up" to any of the subject headings that include this starting resource and then navigating "down" from those subject headings to other, potentially unknown, resources.

- One of our goals then is to explore World Wide Web services that might be based on such merged subject trees.