Newly Converted!

~ A Delicious Exploration ~

Wow! I have to admit that I have really begun to love social bookmarking! When I first read the chapter on it in Richardson’s text, I couldn’t really understand it nor how it was going to be useful to me at all. I asked around to friends and family to see what they knew about “social bookmarking” and all I received were blank stares – even from people whom I considered much more tech savvy than myself. I was very skeptical of this Web 2.0 tool and its value.

Being that I needed to understand it for the purposes of EDES 501, I simply dove in and got going. I picked Delicious simply because it was mentioned in many of the books and articles that I had read and it seemed to be popular. I signed up for an account, but stumbled a bit getting my account going. Did I really want the tool bar buttons, etc? I decided that to give it a fair shot, I really had to add them, so I got everything set up as recommended. Then it was time to import my bookmarks… wow, slow! It took a long time to import them and then it took me a very long time to go back and add appropriate tags for all of them. (The good news is this initial set up is only done once!) I also had to go back through my tags and fix my spelling mistakes! (Watch out for mistakes setting up your tags because nothing will correct them for you.)

So, now what? Humm… back to other things and other assignments, I guess. Well, before I knew it, I was using my delicious account! I kept diving back in to add a bookmark or edit existing ones because another great idea for tagging something would occur to me. I even set up a tag “TOREAD” for those great websites, blogs, articles, etc. that are being suggested through our discussions to help me know what great ideas I can come back to explore, but don’t want to get myself sidetracked right then. (Information management at work!)

I was all excited and babbling about this to my mother, so she signed up and checked things out. She came back to me with, “Well, I can see how your dad would use this [I’ll explain more later], but not me. I am a retired person and don’t have much to share with other people. If I came across something I thought you or another friend might like, I’d just e-mail you a link.” At the time, I didn’t have much of a counter-argument, but it has been rattling around in my head. She is looking at this from the wrong side! She has hobbies (i.e. running, sewing, scrapbooking, etc.). She needs to use Delicious to find other people’s great sites! I searched Delicious for the tag “running” (a passion we both share) and the top site had over 5000 people with it tagged and it was a site that I had never visited myself. So, I suspect that at least at the beginning, my mom may “take” more than “give”, but that may change over time too.

I like Delicious for many functions that do not have to do with social interaction as well. I use a number of different computers on a regular basis (personal computer in my basement, our laptop that is usually in our kitchen, my parents’ laptop at the lake with a mobile modem, and my classroom computer). While there is some overlap, I seem to have many different websites in my bookmark/favorites on the different computers (and none on my parents because it isn’t mine!) Since beginning this course, I think my bookmarks have doubled in quantity too! Web-based bookmarking sites, such as Delicious, work at solving the issue of multi-computer usage, as well as making “millions” of sites more manageable for the user.


But what is Social Bookmarking?

I should back up. What is social bookmarking? What about terms like “metadata” and “folksonomy” that get used in connection with social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking websites are Internet sites that provide the user with the ability to save and categorize a personal collection of bookmarks (or “favorites”) and to be able to share them with others (or keep them private, depending on your settings).

The term metadata simply refers to data about data. This term would be used to discuss tags and descriptions of your websites in social bookmarking sites. Folksonomy is a collaborative classification system utilizing metadata. Social bookmarking sites are an example of a folksonomy.

When I began my exploration I had no idea, but there are a lot of different social bookmarking sites to choose from! In an on-line article in the Search Engine Journal, the author lists more than 125 different social bookmarking sites! Some even create more elaborate fields (i.e. author, publication date, etc.) that enable easy referencing.


Implications for Teaching & Library

I am already finding Delicious useful for my own information management and am excited by the possibilities!

In a school setting I can envision utilizing social bookmarking. Within my Delicious account, I could create a tag such as “GradeOne09-10” and tag all relevant sites to my classroom with this tag. Once parents were informed of its existence, they could readily access the sites deemed important to the Grade One class for 2009-2010. This might include curriculum links, class blogs, my own personal blog, photo sharing sites that housed class pictures, and other websites to support class learning. This is more useful than a list of websites that are included in something like a printed newsletter because the list does not have to remain static. The ease of adding or removing websites to the relevant lists is impressive.

As aforementioned, my dad would have many uses for a social bookmarking account. He is very active with Manitoba Public Insurance and the National Automotive Association of Car Clubs (NAACC) and he monitors legislation all over North America. His bookmarks are extensive. When he is on vacation, he does not have access to this information unless he updates his list on his laptop (and definitely not available if he is using a PC in a library, book store, etc.). With social bookmarking he would have full access to these sites. The ability for my dad to readily share these sites with the other executive members of NAACC would be invaluable. While this may not be a teaching implication, it demonstrates how members of various groups can utilize sites like Delicious to share and manage information.

At this point I feel the need to share a complaint however! In many of the articles that I read the authors simply state that tools like Delicious are wonderful for reference librarians, but no specific examples were provided. I do not currently work as a librarian, but as a classroom teacher. This leaves me to extrapolate what I think the uses are. My approximation includes collaborating with other librarians/libraries, facilitating searches for colleagues and patrons, and personal data management. However, I wish I had found a more explicit “Librarians’ use of Social Bookmarking for Dummies” version! (If you know of one, please share!)


What’s Next?

In the article “Add Delicious Data to Your Library Website” by A. Darby and R. Gilmour, more sophisticated uses of social bookmarking are explained. “For more control over how Delicious data appears on a website, the user must interact with Delicious through RSS, JSON or XML”. (Darby & Gilmour, p. 101) These interactions involve some computer programming that I may not quite be ready for, but I am aware that there is another level of use that I can aspire to!

C. Harris, in his article “What’s Next for Social Bookmarking”, speaks of “a new breed of tools emerging that can provide a better end-user experience [than current popular social bookmarking sites]” (p. 14) He describes an upcoming, new tool called Webnotes. According to Harris, “this tool feels like it was custom designed for use by librarians… Webnotes is designed for research, and, as such focuses on organizing text from sites” (p. 14) Webnotes is something to look for and explore in the future.

I need to give my dad a Delicious tutorial! I can see the value in it for him and, likely, I would also fine-tune my own ability to use Delicious if I were to teach someone else how to use it! I will also talk up Delicious to my other family members, friends and colleagues to begin to build a network. (It is currently a lonely little network connecting me with just my mother who didn’t even tag her bookmarks!)

Finally, I need to avoid re-inventing the wheel! The next time I want to find a website on a topic, I’ll need to include a Delicious search in my quest for information. While it may not replace a more conventional search, such as using Google, it could supplement it.

I am excited over this Web 2.0 tool and look forward to utilizing it more thoroughly!


References:

Baker, L. (December 6, 2007). 125 Social Bookmarking Sites: Importance of User Generated Tags, Votes, and Links. Search Engine Journal. Retrieved from http://www.searchenginejournal.com/125-social-bookmarking-sites-importance-of-user-generated-tags-votes-and-links/6066/

Darby, A., & Gilmour, R.. (2009). Adding Delicious Data to Your Library Website. Information Technology and Libraries, 28(2), 100-103. Retrieved from ABI/INFORM Global. (Document ID: 1724219691).

Harris, C. (2009, February). What's Next for Social Bookmarking? School Library Journal, 55(2), 14. Retrieved from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1639656531).

Richardson, W. (2009). Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for the Classroom. USA: Corwin Press.