Week 5 - Bookmarking (part 3)

Social Bookmarking

So far, the methods of bookmarking (or creating favourites) is a personal thing – only on the computer you are logged into, or under your NHS ATHENS login. No one else can see them.

Social bookmarking services allow you to save or bookmark your favourite web sites online and to share them with others. Using a Social bookmarking service is like saving favourites to Internet Explorer or any other web browser but with added benefits:

Watch this video to see what is meant by social bookmarking (you'll need your headphones):



Some advantages of social bookmarking

• You can access your bookmarks from any computer or device with an internet connection
• You can share your bookmarks with others (although you can also keep any that you don’t want to share private!)
• You can “tag” bookmarks with relevant keywords to help you (and others) to retrieve them easily.

More about Tagging

Tagging is a facility used by many Web 2.0 services – not just bookmarks. It allows you to associate keywords or phrases with particular items (for example pictures, videos, bookmarks, catalogue records etc) in order to make them easier for you and others to retrieve. You can add as many tags as you like which makes it easy to describe items that cover many different concepts.

It is also possible to use “shared tags”. These are tags used by people who want to share items on a particular topic. To facilitate this, users tag relevant items with an agreed shared tag. For example, to share items with other people participating in the Oxford 23 Things programme, add the tag “ox23”. A search on ox23 will then reveal all the items shared by programme members.

Services

The following services offer Social Bookmarking: Delicious, Diigo, Digg, Connotea(which also works for journal articles) and Stumbleupon. A longer list is available. 

Thing 10 - Delicious

1. Sign up for a Delicious account at http://delicious.com/ This will require you to set up a Yahoo account.
   During the sign up process you will be given the option of downloading the Delicious “bookmarklet”. This is a useful button which sits in the “links” toolbar in Internet Explorer and other internet browsers and allows you to bookmark web sites to Delicious as you browse. Install it if you wish. If you're not sure you can always install it later.
2. If you haven't used Delicious before, take a look through the information in “How do I get started?”
3. Save at least five of your favourite web sites as bookmarks and give each tags.
   
   If you have installed the Delicious "bookmarklet" you can save web sites to Delicious simply by visiting the web site you want to save and clicking in your links toolbar.
   
   If you haven't installed the "bookmarklet", log on to your Delicious account and click "Save New Bookmark" (top right) you will then have to enter the URL of the page you want to save followed by its title and tags.
   
4. Save your blog and/or another web site on the theme of web 2.0 as a bookmark. Add tags and this time also include the “23cammedlib” tag so that other members of the programme can find the bookmark.
   
5. Choose “Tags” / “Explore” and search for the tag “23cammedlib” to view bookmarks shared by other member of the programme. Save any pages that look interesting to your own Delicious account.

Extra Task: optional

a. Read about tagging and folksonomies by searching using the Delicious search. This searches all the public bookmarks saved on Delicious. Save any pages that look interesting to your own Delicious account (don’t forget to share them using the 23cammedlib tag as well as some of your own tags).

b. Send a bookmark to another user by adding their delicious username to the “send” field. (If you don’t know anyone using Delicious you can send a bookmark to me: ilk21).

BLOG:

Take a screenshot of your list of favourites/bookmarks, and load it into your blog. Label it “Thing 10”.

BLOG:

blog about the difference between the 3 ways of creating book marks and what the advantages/disadvantages would be.

Which is your favourite? And why?

Which do you think would be a students favourite? And why?