Week Eight - Social Bookmarking

Let's start with Common Craft's Social Bookmarking in Plain English.



Social Bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, and manage bookmarks of web pages. You are probably familiar with the “Bookmarks” or “Favorites” folders in Firefox or Internet Explorer. Social Bookmarking is similar but provides you access to your favourite web pages no matter what computer you are using, whether at home or in the office or any computer at the university or college. No matter which computer you use, you will have access to all your favourite web sites.

Although there are a number of social bookmarking sites, we will be using one called Delicious (formerly called del.icio.us). Delicious lets you see the bookmarks that others have added and how they are tagged (though you now have the option not to share your bookmarks). This open sharing of links is called social bookmarking. As bookmarks are added and tagged, a folksonomy emerges.

A tag is just a keyword or term, and tagging is the process of assigning or associating them to something. In the same way you stick labels on physical objects, you use tags to label digital elements such as web links, blog posts, photos, or other user-generated content. Once you assign a tag to an object, you can easily find that object later by searching the tag.

Activity #1
Search del.icio.us for something you’re interested in. Check out some of the tags people have used for that topic. Try the same search in Google or another Internet search engine. In your blog, tell us what you thought! How do the results compare? Were there any that you didn’t expect? Did you find any tags that were confusing or especially useful?

Activity #2
Set up an account on del.icio.us. Add a few websites and add your own tags to each of your links.

Activity #3
If you like del.icio.us and want to easily add bookmarks to your account, you can put buttons on your browser toolbar. Instructions are available for Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Optional Activity
Read this article to learn more about social bookmarking and integrating into Higher Education.