Social_Bookmarking

This page could use a little more revising: =Organizing the Internet: Social Bookmarking=

Overview:
By some accounts there are over **1.6 million new blog posts every day**. That's a lot of content! No single person or small group of people could possibly have enough time or experience to sort all that information out. Enter: Social Bookmarking. Social bookmarking allows people to keep track of information on the web in an organized and sharable fashion.

Objectives:

 * 1) Quickly locate information that is current and relevant to you and your colleagues & friends
 * 2) Bookmark websites in a way that others can view and benefit from

The More You Know:
"Folksonomy" is a term used to describe the collaborative tagging and ranking of media posted online. Instead of having a small group of experts tag and organize all the information flooding onto the internet, you and I (the average user) can add keywords to content and let computers save and aggregate that data. One of the best sites that collect this information is Digg.
 * Folksonomy as an Organizational Scheme:**



What's more, each link submitted to the site gets it's own threaded comment area where we (the masses) can discuss the content.
 * Digg** is a website where anyone can submit a link to content (e.g. news story, blog post), and once it's listed on the website folks can "digg" it (which gives it a positive vote). The more people that "digg" the content, the more popular it becomes (you can also help to "bury" content by giving it a negative vote). The more popular the content becomes, the more likely it is to appear on the digg front page where it's seen and appreciated by the masses.

//"From the biggest online destinations to the most obscure blog, Digg surfaces the best stuff as voted on by our users."// -Digg "About Us" page

[|StumbleUpon] - is another good way to find information this way and it also has some other social bookmarking features as described below so may be a good site to compare with Delicious or Diigo.

How to keep track of the goodness you find?
When you find a good site you'll often want to bookmark it so you can refer to it later. But have you ever collected so many bookmarks that you felt like you needed the power of Google to help you find the one you're looking for? Have you ever wanted to access your bookmarks when you were on a computer besides your own? Let's face it--there's so much new content going online that a static list that's kept on one machine is not likely to be a viable long term solution!

In a nutshell, social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a website where they are (generally) viewable by anyone. Bookmarks are not organized in folders, but by tags (keywords) that you add. You can then sort your bookmarks by tag or simply conduct a search. In addition to your own bookmarks, you can see what your colleagues and other people have bookmarked and sort those links by popularity--together you and the network filter and bring order to some of the best information available on the internet. For a a good idea on what social bookmarking is, not just Delicous, view the video by Common Craft on Delicious's web site: [|how to explain delicious to your parents]
 * Social Bookmarking to the Rescue!**


 * Note:** Even if you decide not to keep your bookmarks on a social bookmarking site they are a great resource for finding popular (and recent) content. View the video below on how to make the most of searching on Delicious.

Delicious:
**Del.icio.us** is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites in use today.


 * Start by browsing the about Del.icio.us page to see some ideas for using social bookmarking
 * Then sign up for an account so you can start bookmarking
 * To make posting bookmarks to the site easier, add a bookmarklet to your browser
 * Find out the username of some of your colleagues in class and add them to your network (help and instructions are here). Make sure you share yours with others, many often post this information in their site so others can subscribe.

To make life easier Delicious provides an RSS link for every tag, as well as the most popular and the most recent bookmarks on the site. You may want to add some of those to your RSS aggregator!

Searching with Delicious
Now that you have an account and are creating bookmarks with tags, here is a video that explains how to search through Delicious to find resources you or others have tagged: media type="youtube" key="G90btccymqQ" height="385" width="480" align="center"

Diigo:
Another popular social bookmarking tool is Diigo. Diigo has similar functions to Delicious but also allows you to highlight and comment right on web pages. This makes ideal often for using with classes or other small groups so people can mark and annotate online documents or pages to share and discuss. You might like to use this in addition to (they have a nice feature that sends any pages you bookmark also to your Delicious account) or perhaps us it in place of Delicious. Take a look at their introductory video here:

media type="youtube" key="0RvAkTuL02A" height="385" width="480" align="center"

Other Bookmarking:
Instead of using the tagging concept, some social bookmarking sites use the concept of folders for organizing links. For example ikeepbookmarks is a site that uses this scheme and may be more familiar for novice users and younger children. Take a look at it as well.

The Main Idea
As students, we are used to organizing everything for ourselves. As teachers, we need to think about other audiences as well such as parents, students, and colleagues. Also, most teachers tend to use multiple computers. Some use one at home and another at school. Others switch rooms and computers within their own buildings. Social bookmarking allows you, and others, to share your bookmarks and sift through all the information on the internet.