Lesson 5: Social Bookmarking & Tagging

This time out we'll be exploring social bookmarking. For the most part we'll be looking at delicious, but there are optional activities included for exploring other social bookmarking sites.

What's social bookmarking?

• A way to organize websites, and share them with others
• Bookmarking for folks who use more than one computer across their day
• A new way to classify information, by tapping into the hive mind
• A valuable resource for collecting, organizing, and eventually embedding selected resources
  

Need more information? Check out these materials:

• Social Bookmarking in Plain English (Video by Commoncraft, 3 min 25 sec)
• Slides from ILW2 Social Bookmarking in-person Session on Tuesday, April 14 (PowerPoint)
• Social Bookmarking with Delicious (PDF guide by Tech-Ease)
• Delicious libraries - some great examples of libraries using del.icio.us (A continually updated blog post from mélange, last updated on September 24, 2008)
  

When you're ready to dive in, try these activities

1. If you do not already have one, please sign up for an account on del.icio.us (registration page).
2. Find five websites (they don't have to be blogs!) you think your fellow participants ought to know about. Bookmark them in del.icio.us and tag them "ilw2" (you might want to play with multiple tags too). When you're done, check out what else has the 2.0things tag. Did anyone else find the same sites you did? (Feel free to keep bookmarking and tagging sites for the remainder of the course! It'll be a great resource for everyone afterwards.
3. Over the remaining weeks of Web 2.0 Things, bookmark and tag at least five webpages in delicious (or the social-bookmarking utility of your choice) for yourself. For the page that has the most other people bookmarking it, find out who else bookmarked it and how they tagged it. Feel free to follow tags to see what else has been bookmarked under them! Write a blog post on your impressions of social bookmarking and how you think it could be used in libraries.
4. Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags they used to categorize this reference?
5. Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. Can you see the potential of this tool for your work? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? How can libraries take advantage of social bookmarking sites?
6. (optional) Want to play with some other social bookmarking sites? Enter the same search term (eg. "Library 2.0") in the searchbox at the following sites. Compare the results and blog about it. (don't forget to tag it and share it!)

• del.icio.us - popular social bookmarking site. User tagged (search without quote marks).
• Connotea - "Free online reference management for all researchers, clinicians and scientists". User tagged
  
• CiteULike - "a free online source to organise your academic papers". User tagged.
• (there's more -- play with ones from this list)

Still want more? Compare your searches above to using Google or Google Scholar

Can't get enough? You can compare book finding with tags: search for books on a topic using LCSH in Voyager and tags in LibraryThing

There's lots you can do with RSS feeds and tagged lists, feel free to play with those options, and keep your eyes on this blog for a post later in the week showing off some examples of library implementations of RSS feeds of delicious tags.

We'd love it if you write a blog post about what you find, and leave a comment here telling us where to find it. You can also leave your reflections here, as comments.

Want to know more about social bookmarking? Check out some of these resources from 5 Weeks to a Social Library

Essential Readings

• Social Bookmarking Showdown - Gilbertson, Scott, Wired News - Compares and rates the major social bookmarking tools.
• The Brave New World of Social Bookmarking: Everything You Always Wanted to Know but Were Too Afraid to Ask - Etches-Johnson, Amanda, Feliciter - Great introduction to social bookmarking and tagging.
• Social Bookmarking - Wikipedia - Brief encyclopedic entry on the subject.
• Social Bookmarking, Folksonomies, and Web 2.0 Tools - Gordon-Murnane, Laura, Searcher (If you have access to Proquest, the .pdf includes charts and comparison tables) - Excellent overview of bookmarking and the advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies, useful charts compare features of 10 bookmarking tools.
• Product Pipeline - Rethlefsen, Melissa L., Library Journal - Good brief article about del.cio.us and other social bookmarking tools.
• Folksonomy - Wikipedia - encyclopedia entry on the topic.

Supplemental Readings

• How to use delicious to foster collaboration - Callahan, Shawn - Brief blog post about using del.icio.us for collaboration within a team.
• Social Bookmarking Tool Comparison, ConsultantCommons.org - Pros and cons of bookmarking and a long list of tools.
• Social Bookmarking Faceoff - Iskold, Alex, Read/Write Web - Feature comparison and analysis of the social bookmarking market.
• Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise - Millen, David, Feinberg, Jonathan, and Bernard Kerr, IBM - Discusses Dogear, IBM's internal social bookmarking system.
• The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging - Kroski, Ellyssa, InfoTangle - Discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies and tagging.
• Folksonomies: power to the people - Quintarelli, Emanuele - Lengthy paper discussing the A-Z of folksonomies.

Questions? Comments? Leave them here, or contact Rudy or Helen