Saturday, February 9, 2008

My Introduction to Social-Bookmarking

I first heard the term “social-bookmarking” about six months ago. I found a simple informative video by Lee Lefever of the Commoncraft Show, called Social Bookmarking in Plain English which explained that social bookmarking is a new way to bookmark, using a website instead of your browser for storage, organizing your bookmarks with tags and giving you access to the sites that other people tag. With over 15 billion webpages on the internet, this kind of tool sounded appealing just to keep track of all the information I might need or want as I search the web.

I followed the instructions on the CommonCraft Show video and went to delicious.com to add two buttons to my browser, one being a tag button and the other a shortcut to the del.icio.us website. After finding a website I wanted to save, I simply clicked on the tag button, assigned a couple of tags (keywords or category labels) and hit “Save”. It couldn’t have been simpler.

I found myself wishing I had discovered this tool at the beginning of my courses to organize all those sites I had come across. No longer will I need to copy URL’s and paste them into folders or weed through my Internet Explorer’s list of favourites. Now I can access my favourites from any computer. I quickly began spreading the del.icio.us word and moving the bookmarks on my browser to the del.icio.us website.

5 comments:

Jennifer Branch-Mueller said...

I think about TL-DL and probably we need to have a Del.icio.us site (or another) to keep links of interest to those of us in the program.

Add a tag like TLDL to all posts of interest to us all?

Must go back and do that.

Linda Morgan said...

15 billion websites - wow. Who can come up with a visual that could demonstrate the magnitude of that number....

Cindy said...

Just going to Favorites made me realize that yes indeed Del.icio.us is the answer to organizing all the 'stuff' I had put into Favorites. When I explain to staff what it is about they are nodding their heads in agreement. May have to give an inservice!

elizabeth said...

Jenn,
If you did put a unique tag on all the articles of interest to TLDL students and we (the students) subscribed to an RSS of that tag, it would eliminate some of your work in the sending out of articles as well as providing one spot to search. What a great tool for organizing resources.

elizabeth said...

Cindy,
I think even a quick afterschool session would get folks rolling with del.icio.us as it is so user friendly. It is just one of those tools that requires very little to get started and gives an immediate sense of value. It is something that simplifies by organizing with almost no effort.