Web 2.Xpo:Social Bookmarking

Wesleyan Unversity, 14 May 2007

Ten things you can do with social bookmarking

• Save bookmarks to a server you can access from anywhere.
• Tag and annotate bookmarks for easier management and retrieval
• Search other people's bookmarks by tag
• Link to any subset of your bookmarks
• Follow the bookmarks of an individual who shares your interests
• Subscribe to tags or users or any combination of both
• Collaborate on web research projects
• Find out how popular and current particular resources are
• Synchronize remote and local lists of bookmarks
  
• Maintain lists of links simply by creating bookmarks.
  

Our top choice for a social bookmarking service

There are more social bookmarking tools and services than you can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, no one tool is best for all jobs. Still, as an all-around winner, we are recommending del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/ ) for the Wesleyan community. The vast del.icio.us user base increases the collective benefit of tagging. Moreover, del.icio.us offers impressive tools for integrating your web-based bookmarks with you browser, especially if you are using the FireFox (http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/ ) browser, another tool that we can recommend.

Getting started

1. Go to http://del.icio.us/ and create an account. It's easy and free.
2. If you're using Firefox, get the addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

Runners up

del.icio.us was our top pick as an all-around tool, but it does not:

• Archive copies of the pages you bookmark (Try furl, http://furl.net or ma.gnolia, http://ma.gnolia.com )
  
• Search the full text of bookmarked pages (Try furl, http://furl.net )
  
• http://ma.gnolia.com has nice group tools. If your 'group' is a class, then Blackboard Scholar (http://www.scholar.com -- not yet available at Wesleyan) could be a convenient choice.
• To automatically interpret bibliographic data for academic citations try CiteULike, http://citeulike.org or Connotea, http://connotea.org. Zotero, http://www.zotero.org, though it saves data to your local machine, is one to watch for the future.

Who to contact

Contact your ACM or Kevin Wiliarty (kwiliarty), or visit:
http://wordpress-pilot.wesleyan.edu/web20/about/social-bookmarking