A TECHTORIAL

WHAT IS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING?

What do you do when you find a Web site you want to save and retrieve later? You probably add it to Favorites or Bookmarks in your browser (Internet Explorer, for example). But there are a couple of problems with that:

  • What happens if you bookmark a site at home, and then want to go to it at school, but can't remember the URL?
  • Or, let's say you have 100+ author Web sites bookmarked in Internet Explorer and have the sites arranged by authors' last names. You're looking for a great criticism of Jane Austen you had bookmarked, but it's not in the Austen folder. Where is it? And, what do you do when you finally remember it was on a Bronte site? Do you save it twice, once to your Austen folder and once to your Bronte folder?
  • Or, suppose you have 23 sites in your Tennyson folder and you need to find one in particular quickly. You remember a phrase from it, but not the actual URL or page title. And your students, year after year, have been discovering some amazing research online and you'd like to take advantage of their efforts by combining their bookmarks with yours. But how?

Social bookmarking solves all those problems! Instead of saving Web sites to your browser's Bookmarks folder, you use an online tool that saves your information on a Web site. Each time you save a new Web page there, you type a few keywords or phrases to help you remember what you liked about the site. Those keywords are called tags. And, most social bookmarking tools allow users to share lists, so you benefit from the hard work of others interested in the same topics.

Sound confusing? Let's look at Del.icio.us, one of the most popular social bookmarking sites.

When you search for a tag -- "kindergarten," for example -- on Del.icio.us, its search engine looks at every bookmarked Web site to find all those saved with the tag "kindergarten." It then displays a list of those sites, much like any search engine:

The pink highlighting beneath each listed Web site tells how many users have saved that site tagged with the word "kindergarten."

Next: Try it yourself.

 

 
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