Social Bookmarking Part 1

I'm going to try and split my blog up a bit, so it is not so long. Divide and conquer!

Social bookmarking is a Web 2.0 tool that I have not had any experience with. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never personally used it, so this is brand new for me. I looked at three sites - del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, and diigo to try and get a feel for what exactly social bookmarking is.

I chose del.icio.us as the site that I am going to use and create an account with. I chose this particular site because of their help section and because it was the original social bookmarking site that actually coined the phrase, "social bookmarking". I started the whole process by using Google.ca to find out information about social bookmarking and what exactly it was. I found the About section of del.icio.us to be very helpful. It explained exactly what social bookmarking was, why I would want to use it, how to use it and examples of how others have used it. There is also a great Help section that has answers and tips on just about every aspect of the site. I like that there is a section on more advanced features- for people who want to do more with this tool. If anyone is leaning towards using del.icio.us I would highly recommend looking at this site. It would even be helpful for anyone wanting to know more about social bookmarking in general.

I am a person who uses my web browser’s bookmarking feature a lot. I have many sites that are either important for my work or that I think would be useful for students and teachers. Of course the limitation for that tool is that it is only good for my computer and unless I speak to the teacher or student, they won’t know about it. This topic is quite timely for me as I am currently in the process of re-doing the website for the resource centre. The previous one was quite dated and many of the links did not work anymore. I am trying to put together a collection of links for staff and students to help them with their work. It would be great to have a link to my del.icio.us account instead and then I can keep the list updated- as I don’t believe I will always have access to the server for the website.

I also found the potential to use these sites as research tools very appealing. I can see the benefit of this as a student myself and a teacher. So often when I am researching and looking at many different sites with so much information it is easy to lose track of what exactly I have read. I am going to try and do some research on a topic- something fun like going on a vacation- and see exactly how it works and if it would be a good tool to use or not.

I’ll report back with my findings in a couple of days! I am actually very excited about trying this new tool out!

Until next time…

Katie