Halloween Social! It was some del.icio.us candy...
Sorry, that was a bad pun!
Puns = bad. Sharing = good. [or so some saying should go!]
Here is the text of a presentation our Technical Services staff asked me to give on social bookmarking.
Yes, please notice the Halloween theme—it was October 31…
Hi everyone, thank you for coming this afternoon to escape the ghosts, ghouls, candy corn, and snack size snickers of old hallows eve and listen to me talk to you about social bookmarking. I’m going to start by defining some of the terms you may or may not already be familiar with, terms like social bookmarking, tagging, folksonomy, to give you a good foundation as we move into tools of the social networking trade and some ways you might use these gadgets and gizmos.
Slideshow: http://www.commoncraft.com/bookmarking-plain-english
What is "social bookmarking"?
In a former life I was an English grad student, and we all really liked to define our terms, so let’s start there. So what, exactly, is social bookmarking? It is an online, public bookmarks system (bookmarks are also known as "favorites”). Social bookmarking is a way to store, classify, share and search your Internet bookmarks.
As you browse the Web from your computer, you might find yourself visiting certain sites regularly or come across sites you like or want to visit again when you have more time, so you save, or bookmark, those sites in your browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, etc.). Great, no need to write down long urls or email lists of links to yourself! Unfortunately, these bookmarks have some faults:
- The bookmarks in your home computer aren't available at your office, or at your friend's place, or at any of the computers in this room.
- Above a certain number of bookmarks, it becomes hard to find what you need among so many, even when using folders to separate them.
Social bookmarking solves both of these problems because when you use a social bookmarking service, like del.ici.ous, bookmarks are now online and available to you wherever you are.
It’s useful for… Features and advantages of social bookmarking
People who use multiple computers in various locations you can access all of your bookmarks from any computer that has a web connection.
You can discover similar items within your own bookmarking account as well as within the larger community: "whoever bookmarked this, also bookmarked..."
It’s a great way to organize your bookmarks through tags because one bookmark can have one or more tags and those tags are meaningful to you—not the Library of Congress.
You can also share: giving people a link to your list of links allows you to share resources with your peers, managers, students, & others.
From a practical, work standpoint, you can also use the social bookmarking community, the folk and the folksonomy: you can see which search terms and keywords the “masses” are using to collect search strategies & information for bibliographies and for website development because you can see trends or popular topics at a particular time.
There are several social bookmarking services, but the most popular one, and the one I am most comfortable with, is del.icio.us.
It’s delicious
Partly because it was one of the first bookmarking, partly because it is quite simple to use, and partly because its name lends itself to all sorts of good links to fun pictures in slideshows, del.icio.us is, nowadays, one of the most popular social bookmarking services. However, to a beginner, its initial appearance may be intimidating.
So what is it?
It is a database that is built by the general public, the folks, and it simply contains links to sites that other people liked and wanted to remember.
If you are using the “social community tagging” aspect of the site, you’ll find that it is better for finding popular topics and items. It currently tends to focus on items of interest to technophiles and young adults, but growing and diversifying with people like me adding 35 food blog links per day.
Most importantly, what you add changes the profile and composition of the site.
How do I start?
Registration is really quite simple. On the initial page, you’ll see this: [referring to slide] and you simply fill it out like you’ve filled out dozens [hundreds] of other forms—yes, you do have to have another username and password to add to your already lengthy list… And then you click "Register." Afterwards, you will be required to prove that you are a human and will be prompted to type distorted numbers or letters into a box, which apparently prevents someone from writing a program that registers 100 different accounts in a matter of seconds.
Tags
As an added bonus feature, when you add a new bookmark to your social bookmarking service, you can classify it using tags, which are nothing more than to describe the bookmark, such as "child" or "pumpkin" or “child_holding_pumpkin. By assigning keywords that are meaningful for you, you can sort and view just the bookmarks with that particular tag.
But what about the "social" part? I use that word because all your bookmarks can be made public. This means that you can browse the bookmarks from anyone who uses the same social bookmarking service. But it's also possible to see the newest added bookmarks or the current popular ones for the online community as well as for your own account. You can also "give" or suggest bookmarks to friends.
To tag or not to tag, save or not to save
In the case of Firefox, for instance, when clicking on the "add to del.icio.us" button, a window like this will appear: [shot of delicious add page]
As A part of the registration process, del.icio.us should automatically detect which browser you are using, and will give you some instructions for adding "add to del.icio.us" and "my del.icio.us" buttons to your browser. Installation should also be really easy, but I’ve had a bit of trouble installing them—and if you want to use them, they have to be installed for each computer you use. In preparing for this presentation, I realized that these buttons aren't actually required, but they make using del.icio.us even easier. To save links without
- to access your bookmarks list, simply go to http://del.icio.us/username (replacing "username" here with your real username, of course.
- to add a new bookmark, go to http://del.icio.us/post/, this will take you to a page asking you for the same data as shown in the previous image (address, description, notes and tags).
Now how do I use this?
What I like about this example is that there are several tags already suggested, due to the large number of people who have added this particular bookmark (one more advantage of the social part: it saves work!). But remember, you can change anything you want: choose already chosen keywords or choose your own. There are a few things I want to point out on this page:
The title of the page is normally saved as the default description. If this is all you need to jog your memory, keep it and skips the next notes section; if not, change it to something more meaningful for you.
The notes field is good if a) have a squishy memory and forget why you wanted to save something in the first place or b) you have a quote from the document, another page to refer to, your opinions, or something else special that you’d like to remember. But, word to the wise, I found out the hard way that there is a 255 character limit…
As I mentioned there are several options for the tags you choose to use: the first are your own. I recommend choosing words that are meaningful to you, regardless of whether they are meaningful in the larger social network.
- At the same time, and separate from the tagging standards of the community [I’m thinking of naming conventions and a common lexicon here], it’s a good to be mindful and consistent about the words you use. For instance, at this time, whether a word is singular or plural matters; if you tag something as “apples” and then do a search for “apple,” it will not come up.
- The only real limitation on tags is that they can’t include spaces. So if your web page is about a two-word place like "
- However, while tags are great for organizing and finding your own personal links, the great thing about delicious is that you can use the tag community to relate content to your own tags. This means you build what delicious calls “a collaborative repository of related information, driven by personal interests and creative organization.” For instance, to view everybody's bookmarks about sweets, visit http://del.icio.us/tag/sweets. To see the most popular items tagged as sweets, visit http://del.icio.us/popular/sweets.
For pages that have already been tagged, delicious will also give you a list of Recommended tags and Popular tags. You can use them or ignore them, it’s up to you and how you want to use the site.
When you are finished, click "save” and that’s it, link saved!
What else can I do? Snoop, suggest, see, research, view the latest and greatest
To see someone else's bookmarks (say, a friend's), go to http://del.icio.us/username (replacing the "username", of course)
To suggest one of your bookmarks to someone, add a tag "for:username" to it. The recipient will see that bookmark on his/her "links for you" section, and may add it to his/her own list, or not
To see which of your bookmarks has a particular tag, go to http://del.icio.us/username/tagname (replacing "username" with yours, and "tagname" with the tag)
To check out all bookmarks with a tag, http://del.icio.us/tag/tagname (replacing "tagname")
To see the most recently added bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/recent . Usually, these change very quickly, because del.icio.us has many users at all times
To view the most popular bookmarks (that is, which are currently being added by many people, giving you a view of "what's hot" on the Internet): http://del.icio.us/popular
Edit and delete bookmarks
Once you have saved an item, you can edit its description, notes, and tags by going to your bookmarks and clicking on the "edit" link next to that bookmark's description. That’s the same place to look if you'd like to delete an item.
Keep it to yourself: Private and public bookmarks
By default, the bookmarks you save are public. If you see "not shared" next to a bookmark that means it is a private bookmark and only you can see it. However, if you're logged out, you won't be able to see your private bookmarks either.
If you’d like to change a private bookmark to public, click the "share" link next to it.
To change a public bookmark to private, first enable private saving in your settings. Then edit your bookmark, check the do not share box, and save it. While saving a new bookmark, you can also check the do not share box to make that bookmark private.
Customize your view with tag options: my top three
One of the really cool things about your delicious links page is that you can change how you view it.
· View as a TAG CLOUD or a LIST
· Sort alphabetically or by how often you have accessed the link
· Bundle tags: Bundles are a way to arrange previously-used tags into groups. You can view by bundle or hide a certain bundle.
