Electronic Highways
Social bookmarking
YouTube videos. Blogs. Online shopping. News sites. For many of us, the amount of Web content we encounter on a daily basis is overwhelming. It’s enough to make you consider how to properly organize all the latest information you discover online. Perhaps you’d like to easily save the interesting sites you encounter and access these bookmarks from any computer. Maybe you would like to put together an organized collection of your favorite photography sites. What if you could then share this collection with the world and also meet others who share this interest?
Luckily for the Web-obsessed, social bookmarking is available. As one of many emerging Web 2.0 technologies, the concept of social bookmarking allows you to easily store, share and organize your favorite sites. Social bookmarking involves saving Web content using “tags” instead of the traditional Web browser system of folders. Through this tag-based classification system, you control the organization and personalize the Web content you find. Within a social bookmarking community, your bookmarks are available publicly to a network of individuals, but can be saved privately or shared with specific people.
Social bookmarking sites abound. With more than 5 million users, Delicious remains as one of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the Web. Delicious describes itself as a place “to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too.” Within the Delicious community, finding the best resources on the Web is simple; the most bookmarked sites of any given topic rise to the top of a search.
To get started, you first need to sign up and create an account. Next, install the Delicious buttons into your browser, which will allow you to easily bookmark and share sites. The fun begins when you find a site and then tag it using your browser buttons. How do you properly tag sites? Enter a series of keywords that you feel best describes it. For instance, some tags that would describe the UB Reporter site might include “newspaper,” “campus news” or “University at Buffalo.”
You can use Delicious in a number of helpful ways. A few examples include:
ª Shopping list: Bookmark and save items you would like to purchase in the future.
* Travel planning: Create a collection of Web resources related to your destination.
* Reading list: Keep track of all the books you want to read.
* Writing topics: Bookmark things you want to write about.
* Research: Organize all the articles and resources related to your topic.
For more information on how Delicious works, view the Common Craft video “Social Bookmarking in Plain English”. For more information about Web 2.0 technologies like social bookmarking, check out the UB Libraries’ Web 2.0 Resources Wiki.
—Ligaya Ganster, University Libraries
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