social cataloging!

Hello friends, we are widely using internet for shopping and trading. our previous post was regarding e-shopping(online shopping, particularly in India.) Now we are going to discuss social cataloging!

For this, lets start with the meaning of catalog(catalogue). Catalog is a list or itemized display, as of titles, course offerings, or articles for exhibition or sale, usually including descriptive information or illustrations.

Now a days we find two types of catalogs: physical catalog and digital catalog.

Physical catalog is a paper based, pamphlet or booklet which in which the catalog is printed. its distributed physically by post or by other means to everyone! Its widely called printed catalog. its main purpose is to showcase the company and its offerings.

Cyber/ Digital Catalog is an Internet-based presentation of a set of items available for purchase, including description, price, and ordering information; also called  electronic catalog and web catalog.The comparatively lower costs of on-line catalogs, compared to print catalogs requiring paper, printing, and postage, lowers the entry barriers to catalog selling. A great difference between on-line catalog and print catalog selling is that on-line catalog customers find the marketer rather than the marketer finding them. Consequently, on-line catalog customers tend to differ demographically and in purchase behavior from print catalog customers. On-line catalogs give the marketer worldwide exposure, 24-hour accessibility, and the ability to quickly change price and product. In addition to selling, on-line catalogs are used to increase brand awareness, increase product usage, generate print catalog requests, collect prospect addresses and demographics, and provide two-way communication with customers.

 To date, one of the biggest on-line catalog successes is Amazon.com, which is serving as a model for on-line catalog marketers. An online catalog might refer to:

The retail product offerings of an online shopping service(amazon, flipkart, ebay,...)

An electronic library catalog( Project Madurai,Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, Bookshare,...)An electronic library is a focused collection of digital objects that can include text, visual material, audio material, video material, stored as electronic media formats, along with means for organizing, storing, and retrieving the files and media contained in the library collection.

Digital libraries can vary immensely in size and scope, and can be maintained by individuals, organizations, or affiliated with established physical library buildings or institutions, or with academic institutions. The electronic content may be stored locally, or accessed remotely via computer networks. An electronic library is a type of information retrieval system.

Role of E catalogs:

Now a days social cataloging is playing a major role in our lives. Its a type of ecatalog and is defined as "A social cataloging application is a web application designed to help users to catalog things—books, CDs, etc.—owned or otherwise of interest to them. The phrase refers to two characteristics that generally arise from a multi-user cataloging environment:

The ability to share catalogs and interact with others based upon shared items;

The enrichment or improvement of cataloging description through either explicit cooperation in the production of cataloging metadata or through the analysis of implicit data( for example people who like teddy bear also like other soft toys!)"

Social cataloging applications:

Books: Goodreads, Google Books, LibraryThing.

LibraryThing is a social cataloging web application for storing and sharing book catalogs and various types of book metadata. It is used by authors, individuals, libraries, and publishers.The primary feature of LibraryThing ("LT") is the cataloging of books by importing data from libraries through Z39.50( application layer communications protocol for searching and retrieving information from a database over a TCP/IP computer network) connections and from six Amazon.com stores. 
Users can import information from 690 libraries, including the British Library, Canadian National Catalogue, Library of Congress, National Library of Australia, and Yale University. Should a record not be available from any of these sources, it is also possible to input the book information via a blank form!
Other Book cataloging sites works in similar fashion! University of mysore is listed as a partner by Google Books. On March 28, 2013, Amazon announced its acquisition of Goodreads for an undisclosed amount. 
On the Goodreads website, users can add books to their personal bookshelves, rate and review books, see what their friends are reading, participate in discussion boards and groups on a variety of topics, and get suggestions for future reading choices based on their reviews of previously read books. Once a user has added friends to his profile, he will see the friends' shelves and reviews and can comment on friends' pages. Goodreads organizes offline opportunities as well, such as IRL book exchanges and "literary pub crawls".The website facilitates reader interactions with authors through the interviews, giveaways, authors' blogs, and profile information. There is also a special section for authors with suggestions on promoting their works on the Goodreads site, aimed at helping them reach their target audience.In addition, it has a presence on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and other social networking sites.

Data: Jumper 2.0

Jumper is Enterprise 2.0 software that empowers users to compile and share collaborative bookmarks by crowd-sourcing their knowledge, experience and insights using knowledge tags. ApexKB (formerly Jumper 2.0), is an open source web application script for collaborative search and knowledge management powered by a shared enterprise bookmarking engine that is a fork of KnowledgebasePublisher. Users tag, link, and rate structured data and unstructured data sources, including relational databases, flat file databases, medical imaging, content management systems, and any network file system. It is an interactive, user-submitted recommendation engine which uses peer and social-networking principles to reference any information located in distributed storage devices, either inside or outside the firewall, and capture the collective knowledge about that content, media, or data.
Features

• Search any content, media, data, or people
• Reference data in any distributed storage system
• Create true Global Namespaces
• Build Faceted classification systems
• User published data profiling
• Hyperdata linking of distributed data
• Group-based permissions
• Object level access controls
• User and user role management
• Descriptive tag (metadata)

Devices: gdgt

gdgt also known as Engadget is a news, reviews and opinion outlet with obsessive coverage of cutting edge gadgets, consumer electronics and the science and technology they're built upon. Its currently operates a total of ten blogs—four written in English and six international versions with independent editorial staff. Engadget has in the past ranked among the top five in the "Technorati top 100" and was noted in TIME for being one of the best blogs of 2010, although it has not appeared in that listing in the past several years.

Films: Internet Movie Database

hope you all know, IMDb? Internet Movie Database (abbreviated IMDb) is an online database of information related to films, television programs and video games, taking in actors, production crew, fictional characters, biographies, plot summaries and trivia. Actors and crew can post their own résumé and upload photos of themselves for a yearly fee. U.S. users can also view over 6,000 movies and television shows from CBS, Sony and various independent film makers.

Music: Discogs, Last.fm, Libre.fm, Rate Your Music

Discogs, short for discographies, is a website and database of information about audio recordings, including commercial releases, promotional releases, and bootleg or off-label releases. The Discogs servers, currently hosted under the domain name discogs.com. While the site lists releases in all genres and on all formats, it is especially known as one of the largest online databases of electronic music releases, and of releases on vinyl media. Discogs currently contains more releases than there are English-language Wikipedia pages, at 4.7 million releases, by 3.25 million artists, across nearly 600,000 labels, contributed from over 185,000 contributor user accounts – with these figures constantly growing as users continually add previously unlisted releases to the site over time. Last.fm, Libre.fm, Rate Your Music works similarly!

Scholarly citations: Bibster, CiteULike, Connotea, refbase

Bibster is a Java-based system which assists researchers in managing, searching, and sharing bibliographic metadata (e.g. from BibTeX files) in a peer-to-peer network. In the everyday life of researchers, one has to search for publications or their correct bibliographic metadata. Currently, people search with engines like Google and CiteSeer(a public search engine and digital library for scientific and academic papers, primarily in the fields of computer and information science,)Another method is by simply asking other people that are likely to know how to obtain the desired information.At the moment bibliographic data has to be handled manually and as a result it is not always possible to have an overview over these data masses. It is a time consuming business to search for special topics or publications, be it locally or on several bibliographic databases.

CiteULike is a web service which allows users to save and share citations to academic papers. Based on the principle of social bookmarking, the site works to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and delicious) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share citation information using CiteULike.When browsing issues of research journals, small scripts stored in bookmarks (bookmarklets) allow one to import articles from repositories like PubMed, and CiteULike supports many more. Then the system attempts to determine the article metadata (title, authors, journal name, etc.) automatically. Users can organize their libraries with freely chosen tags and this produces a folksonomy of academic interests.Connotea was a free online reference management service for scientists, researchers, and clinicians,discontinued in March 2013. It was one of a breed of social bookmarking tools, similar to CiteULike.

Conotea was aimed primarily at scientists, and while users could bookmark any webpage they chose, it incorporated special functionality for certain academic resources.

refbase is web-based institutional repository and reference management software which is often used for self-archiving.It can import and export a variety of standard bibliographic formats, including BibTeX, Endnote, RIS, ISI, MODS XML, PubMed, Medline, RefWorks, and Copac. It can generate formatted bibliographies and citations in LaTeX, RTF, HTML, and PDF. refbase also has advanced search features and can generate RSS feeds from searches. Links using DOIs and URLs can be added, as can links to files. refbase supports the Search/Retrieve via URL (SRU) and OpenSearch web services as well as COinS and unAPI metadata.refbase packages have been put in the official Gentoo Linux and Mandriva Linux repositories and has been used by the United States Geological Survey.

Places and products: KartMe

KartMe is a social networking website and mobile application that specializes in social cataloging. Members organize and share favorite links, products and places in lists called "Karts". The mobile application was an Apple "Staff Pick". The full service has been called a beauty lifesaver, a step beyond bookmarking and useful for home design projects.

Recipes: KeepRecipes

KeepRecipes is a social networking website and mobile application that specializes in social cataloging. Members organize and share favorite recipes from any website. KeepRecipes was started by the team from KartMe. They began by launching charity cookbooks with the most renowned chefs in the world!