Social Bookmarking

Steve is tired of bookmarking the same sites on every computer he uses. He wants a way for his bookmarks to follow him wherever he goes.

Laura wants to share all the really great websites she’s found with her coworkers. But she doesn’t want to keep sending out emails with lists of links. If only she had a place that she could collect those links and people could be notified of new ones when she adds them…

How can Web 2.0 help Steve and Laura?

Social Bookmarking

Steve and Laura can use social bookmarking to do what they want with the information they’ve found online.

What is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine. (Wikipedia)

The video below provides a short demonstration (3:25 min)

If you would like a more detailed explanation, Wikipedia has a very good description of social bookmarking.

Steve’s bookmarks can follow him anywhere he has internet access if he uses a social bookmarking service.
He could try: Google bookmarks | delicious | Faves

•   If you already have a Google account (through Gmail or another Google application), Google bookmarks can be a good choice. Google bookmarks allows you to save bookmarks with one click (if you have the Google toolbar) and add tags to your bookmarks. However, Google bookmarks does not allow you to share your bookmarks with anyone else.

•   Delicious will let you save your bookmarks with one click, add tags and share bookmarks with people. There are lots of ways to share your Delicious bookmarks – there’s even a Facebook application!

•   Faves is a little different, in that it allows you to save bookmarks (and tag and share them) but it also works to help you discover new sites. You tell Faves.com what you’re interested in and you’ll see sites that are related to those interests.

Laura can share the websites she’s found with the RSS feeds that you can generate using social bookmarking services.
She could try: diigo |clipmarks | delicious

•   Diigo allows you to not only bookmark, tag and share websites, but also to highlight specific parts of a website and make notes. You can share these notes as well. The Diigo toolbar allows you to do this very easily, with just a few mouse clicks.

•   Clipmarks is similar to Diigo, but instead of making notes on the website itself you actually “clip” the parts that are most relevant and those parts appear in your bookmark.

•   Delicious allows users to add notes about a website to the bookmark, but not to highlight or bookmark a specific section of a website.

Vocabulary
•   Bookmark - A direct link to an often visited site, saved in your browser for easy access. Bookmarks help you keep track of Web sites you frequently visit. Bookmarks can also be called favorites.(netlingo)
•   Bookmarklet - A bookmarklet is a small computer application (an applet), stored as the URL of a bookmark in a web browser or as a hyperlink on a web page. … they are designed to add one-click functionality to a browser or web page. (Wikipedia)
•   Folksonomy - refers to a "taxonomy" of knowledge organized by ordinary "folks." In other words, regular people like you and [me] are building networks of knowledge based on common interests by combining "what they know" with "who they know." (netlingo)
•   Tag cloud - A tag cloud or word cloud (or weighted list in visual design) is a visual depiction of user-generated tags, or simply the word content of a site, used typically to describe the content of web sites. Tags are usually single words and are typically listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown with font size or color. (Wikipedia)

Social Bookmarking Activity:

1. Choose one of the bookmarking services listed and register for an account:
Delicious
Faves
Diigo
Clipmarks
2. Once you have completed the registration process, find five websites that you think others should know about. Bookmark them in the service you registered for and tag them with learndiscover. Be sure to make them public, because you’re going to share them with everyone here!
3. Once you’ve got the five bookmarks saved, post a link to your account in the Social Bookmarking forum (see below for sample links).
Be sure to take a look at everyone else’s links. You can add the people here as friends if they’re using the same service you are.
Be sure to also keep tagging sites! This can be a very useful resource for everyone involved in Tenn-Share’s Learn & Discover.
Sample links:
http://delicious.com/library_chic/learndiscover
http://faves.com/users/library_chic/tag/learndiscover
http://www.diigo.com/user/library_chic/learndiscover
http://clipmarks.com/clipper/library_chic/