Making It Social

After looking into social-bookmarking and setting up both Furl and De.icio.us accounts, I started wondering about the social aspect. This type of bookmarking is called social because your bookmarks can be made public to benefit other people, just as you can access the bookmarks of others for your benefit. Social-bookmarking services take all of the entries that are tagged (or keyworded) in the same way, connects them and then connects the people that made the tags. With del.icio.us, it is as easy as typing in http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/informationliteracy, where the final word (in this case, informationliteracy) is your search term. In doing this I came across articles saved by folks I consider to be leaders in this field (that’s you Jennifer and Joanne!) and chose to save a couple of those URLs myself. I also found articles saved by Joanne using the Furl search box. Will Richardson, in his book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms, says “social bookmarking sites complete the circle: RSS lets us read and connect with what others write; now we can read and connect with what they read as well.”