Let’s look at the SOCIAL part of social bookmarking.
First – a humorous story. I was presenting at a conference and my handout was a one pager with only my social bookmarking address. It just so happens that I often use the name of ‘Frank Ferter’ in many examples and sites. It wan’t until then that someone pointed out how funny it looked: http://delicious.com/frankferter
If you go to my bookmarks, you will find everything that I have added (except for the ones I have made private).
By looking at my bookmarks, you will be able to tell what my interests are. Why is that significant? Because if we are interested in the same things, it might be a good idea to continue to explore what I have because you will most likely find something useful for yourself.
Example. If I was a web designer and interested in color schemes I would do a search for that on Delicious and find that one of the links a lot of people have bookmarked was “COLOURlovers.”
Over on the right I would also notice that there were over 38,ooo people who have bookmarked this site. ”Hmmmmm,” methinks. ”Maybe that is a good resource for me to check out if 38,000+ people have bookmarked it.”
After I click on the link and find that, yes, it is very valuable, I bookmark it myself. Then, methinks again, “I wonder what other bookmarks these 38,000 people know that I don’t know about.” I click on the number to see who has bookmarked it.
I find a chronological list of those people who have bookmarked it and with which tags they have used. This gives me two resources: 1) a list of similar people and 2) a list of tags which might open my learning exponentially.
This gives me a list of both people and the tags with which they bookmarked this site. When I see someone that has tagged it with ‘color’ and ‘webdesign’ - I can bet they will have other bookmarks I will be interested in.
From there, your discovery of information, your learning becomes unlimited and takes off.
There are other solutions and variants of this, but to keep it simple, this is as far as I will go.
TO DO – Use it. (Difficulty Level: EASY )
- Set up Delicious on each computer you own.
- Start using it for all of your bookmarking needs
- Start using it for your
