What is social bookmarking?

 

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages. Users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. 

Advantages:

 

• Social bookmarking allows you to have access to your bookmarks from any computer connected to the internet. 
• One of the major advantages is that users are not tied to a specific browser (i.e.Internet Explorer Favorites or Firefox Bookmarks).
• Social bookmarking lets users organize or categorized their sites with tags instead of the usual browser based folder system. This enables you to label data with your own terms or popular terms that others have used. 
• Social bookmarking also allows you to share your bookmarks with others.

 

Take a look at  Social Bookmarking in Plain English  at YouTube  

---

 

What is tagging?

Tags are simply keywords or labels that you can use to describe and organize your bookmarks. Tagging is completely unstructured and freeform, allowing users to create connections between data any way they want.  A tag cloud is a way to view tags where the most-used tags are bigger and the less-used ones are smaller. This can help you visually understand and navigate a large collection of bookmarks.

 

Nancy used del.ici.ous to keep track of the websites we used for this wiki.  Below is an example of the page, the bookmarks are on the left, the tag cloud is on the right.  By clicking on any word in the tag cloud, you'll get a list of just the bookmarks with that tag.  So for instance, if we wanted to know all the sites we used about wikis, we could just click on "wikis" in the cloud tag.   Take a look at http://delicious.com/nanyp

(you may have to adjust the "tag options" if you want to see the cloud)

 

 

 

Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging

---

More benefits of social bookmarking

• If friends use Delicious, you can share bookmarks. Send them bookmarks that they can check out and they can do the same for you. You can also use the Delicious subscriptions and network features to keep track of the tags and users you find most interesting.

 

• Discover the most useful and interesting bookmarks - you can see what's hot with users by checking out the "popular tags" feature of Delicious.  

---

  

Where can I participate in social bookmarking?

 

 

 

There are many other Social Bookmarking applications you may want to check out.

---

Examples of Libraries using del.icio.us

 

• Bibliotheques de l'Universite Paris-SorbonneBibliotheques de l'Universite Paris-Sorbonne
• Colorado State University Pueblo
• Dublin City Public Libraries and Archives
• University of Florida George A Smathers LibraryUniversity of Florida George A Smathers Library
• University of Georgia Libraries Cataloging Department
• University of Michigan Health Sciences Libraries

 

---

Del.icio.us can be used to develop Subject Guides. 

 

Check out Library Subject Guides Using Del.icio.us and look at the Subject Guide to Physics  posted by Buley Library at SCSU or the French Language Subject Guide created by the College of New Jersey Library for ideas. Other social bookmarking sites such as Furl and Yahoo's My Web can also be used.

---

How are we using social bookmarking at the State Library?

 

Those of us using del.ic.ious have our bookmarks available on whatever computer we're are using. So, we can get at our bookmarks if we're in our office, on the desk, at home, or out giving a workshop.  And, we can add to our bookmarks list from anywhere.    

 

---

 

Learning Activities 

 

1. Explore the del.icio.us page we developed to build this wiki, http://delicious.com/nanyp
2. Take a look at some of the ways libraries (from the list above) have incorporated del.icio.us to enhance services.
3. Create an account in Del.icio.us, Furl or StumbleUpon and add some bookmarks.  Utilize tags and invite some colleagues to share. 

4. Revisit Technorati (remember from Week 3) and see how tags work with blog posts. Try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?

5.  

In your blog postings this week share the URL's to your bookmarking sites if you'd like. Consider if there is potential to use these tools for research assistance, or for collaborative projects. How could we utilize these tools at the State Library?

---

 

 

 

Number of visitors: