I'm Your Fan

As teachers move through a school year, the Web content that they refer to can change considerably. I have partly been rescued by tabbed browsing, which allows for the grouping and ordering of loads of bookmarks.



Still, it can be a hassle to sync tabs among different computers and users. Enter social bookmarking. As explained in the article 7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking (Educause), SB is “the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and tagging them with keywords”. This can allow us to make our sites searchable by our own categories. Sharing them with others becomes a matter of granting access.

Social bookmarking goes quite far beyond posting our own favorite sites. On Del.icio.us, I can search the site for bookmarks by keyword. I can then try those sites out, look at who posted each of them, and see all of their public bookmarks. If I like what they’ve got, I can add them to my network and become their fan. My network is rather modest right now. Still, these 4 users have hundreds of links. Johntron alone has 453 favorites. Inconceivable!

It is a bit disorienting at first. I would like to know more about Johntron. Does he have a profile somewhere? Also, I am sure that there is a way to group my bookmarks, but haven’t stumbled across it yet. One of the coolest things I have noticed is the cloud view of tags. When looking at a collection of bookmarks, you can see the tags that users have applied. The cloud view shows you all of the tags in a box with the most common tags printed larger. Clicking on a tag filters everything and shows the sites that contain it.

The 7 Things article mentions that when a group of users tags resources to give them some structure, it is called a folksonomy. The possible downside of using a folksonomy is that it is only as good as its tags. The Del.icio.us site seems quite usable so far.

posted by John Lobe @ 9:55 PM