Monday 6 October 2008

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking refers to the practice of storing your favourite web sites online using web-based services such as del.icio.us, Furl or BibSonomy.

The social dimension of this practice comes from making your bookmarked web sites public, allowing you to share them with friends, family and, of course, colleagues and students.

del.icio.us is perhaps the best-known social bookmarking site and the one we’ve recommend. First, you’ll need to create an account. This takes a few seconds and just requires you to choose a username and password. Once, created, you’ll then need to install two buttons on web browser. One button is a short cut to your del.icio.us web page; the other is a tag button allowing you to bookmark the web sites you are viewing and add keywords and comments. Any sites you bookmark are added to your personal del.icio.us page.

By using a social bookmarking site, your bookmarks are no longer tied to a particular computer. Wherever you have web access, you have access to your bookmarks.

When you bookmark a site, you are asked to assign it a tag or keyword. This helps organise your bookmarks and allows you, should you wish, to share your bookmarks more selectively by linking to your page of favourite sites with a particular tag, as in the example below:

http://del.icio.us/Anthony_McNeill/Social_Bookmarking
Adding a web site to your favourites will allow you to view how many other people have bookmarked it as well as the other sites they have added to their favourites. It’s also possible exploit the ‘wisdom of crowds’ by searching for web sites by tag and then bookmarking other users’ bookmarks.

Social bookmarking isn’t just about you sharing web sites with your students. It’s easy for students to create their own individual or joint accounts and creating their own set of tagged and annotated web pages.