Web 2.0 Easier, faster, friendlier

Thing 14 - Social bookmarking

Thing 14: Social Bookmarking: Webcam Conversation

What is social bookmarking ?

When you see something on the web that you want to come back to, instead of saving it to the favourites on your web browser, you can save it to an online social bookmarking site . This can be accessed from any computer using any browser anywhere in the world.

The “book-marking” part of social book-marking is the online equivalent of the ‘favourites’ list that you manage from the browser on your own computer.  The “social” part of social book-marking is the way you can share with others and search what they have saved.

You can label items you save in whichever way makes sense to you. This is called “tagging”.  One website can have any number of tags.

With most social bookmarking sites, you can add a button to your browser toolbar so that you can save something to the site with just one click.

More information is in this Social Bookmarking in Plain English video from Commoncraft.

Why are we learning about social bookmarking?

As well as a place to save and organise your favourite sites online , it is a place where you can discover new sites from people who like to save the same types of things as you do.

What you need to do to complete this Thing

1. Set up an account at delicious.com

2. Save and tag four sites.

3. Search to find other  bookmarked sites tagged with “mu14things2009″

5. How to do the Exercise

1. Go to Delicious.com and sign up for an account.

Follow Step 2 of the sign up and add the Firefox extension to the toolbar.

2. Go to these sites and then use the “tag button ” in your browser toolbar to add a bookmark to your delicious account. Tag them with mu14things2009

• Web 2.0 Easier, faster, friendlier blog
• Your own blog
• The YouTube video, Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams
• Any other site you like a lot, that is OK for us all to see

3. Search to find other  bookmarked sites tagged with “mu14things2009“

6. If you want to try more….

1.  Manually bookmark a site

2. Start at everyone’s bookmarks  for YouTube - Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams . Look to see who else has saved it, how they have tagged it and what else they have put under the same tags - follow the trail every which way.

3.   Create a tag cloud and embed it  in a post on your blog.  This is in your settings menu. See the instructions in this tag rolls page .

4.  Connotea and CiteULike are aimed at universities and scholarly knowledge.  They are  good if you are doing research or collaborative work and want to save items from journals, databases, save and tag pdfs.  Have a look around at them and try them out.

See Also: Educause Seven things you should know about social bookmarking

UPDATE: 3 August 2009 . The online tool that made tag clouds that we talked about in the workshops was wordle.net. Have a go.