Old Way…New Way…Web 2.0 Way Part One…
Social Bookmarking
I cannot tell you how many times I have bookmarked something while surfing the Internet…I find things all the time that, at the time felt useful, so I spread out my “breadcrumbs” to find my way back. The good thing about bookmarks are that if want to go back to that site you have a record. You can back them up, you can import and export, you can even post them as a web page.
In the Web 2.0 world bookmarking and searching explodes into a whole new dimension. We can now save and SHARE our bookmarks, catorgorize them, and find out how many other people have saved them under that catagory. The term…social tagging…
Collaborative tagging became popular on the web in 2004 with social software applications such as social bookmarking and annotation of photographs. Websites that support tagging and the principle of folksonomy are referred to in the context of Web 2.0 because participation is very easy and new tagging data is used in new ways to find information. Tag clouds are frequently used to visualize the most used tags of a folksonomy.
Typically, folksonomies are Internet-based, although they are also used in other contexts. Folksonomic tagging is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search, discover, and navigate over time. A well-developed folksonomy is ideally accessible as a shared vocabulary that is both developed by, and familiar to, its primary users. Two widely cited examples of websites using folksonomic tagging are Flickr and del.icio.us.
I have tried out Del.icio.us, Diig, Clipmark, to name a few, and found that Del.cio.us is the easiest tool to use. You can save and catagorize easily, and display your bookmarks in a variety of ways. You can even set up your own “network” hint…your classroom….and send the bookmarks to the network!!!
What do those buzzwords mean, anyway?
What is social bookmarking?
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website, which means it is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser. This has several advantages.
First, you can get to your bookmarks from anywhere, no matter whether you’re at home, at work, in a library, or on a friend’s computer.
Second, you can share your bookmarks publicly, so your friends, coworkers, and other people can view them for reference, amusement, collaboration, or anything else. (Note that you can also mark bookmarks on del.icio.us as private — only viewable by you — if you like.)
Third, you can find other people on del.icio.us who have interesting bookmarks and add their links to your own collection. Everyone on del.icio.us chooses to save their bookmarks for a reason. You have access to the links that everyone wants to remember. You can see whether two people have chosen to remember a link, or whether it was useful enough for a thousand people to remember — which may help you find things that are useful for you, too.
What are tags?
Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. They’re a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.
Find out more about tags, including some examples and ideas about how you can use them.
