Blog Posting #3

Social Bookmarking Sites
Blog Posting #3-February 11, 2008
When I initially perused the delicious website I was brought back to an idea my boyfriend had shared with me several months ago. Andrew (my boyfriend) spends a lot of time (work and social) on the computer. He visits several websites daily for a variety of reasons ie; work projects or entertainment. His idea was to have a central website that opens as a homepage and have it download information from your favorite webpages. For example...He would go to his home page and he would be able to go from facebook to guitar lessons to his work inventory at the click of one button. All of the websites would be available from one page. I was surprised to see (and I may sound like a dinosaur) that something like this already existed. I initially thought that social bookmarking sites were more of a social neworking idea. Delicious, the first social bookmarking site I discovered (http://delicious/jcloke), is easy to use and very beneficial for anybody who visits multiple websites. How many times have you been playing around on the web when you come across a site that is of interest to you that you may want to go back to? This happens to me on a daily basis. I watched "Social Bookmarking in plain English" on You Tube for a brief overview on how to use these websites and then I went straight to delcious.com. I registered and then downloaded the tag button and the delicious button the YouTube video recommended. Then I started to think of all the websites I visit frequently and decided the best way to do this was through my "favorites". The YouTube video suggested that the favorites option was a great idea, but ended up getting lengthy and unorganized. I couldn't agree more! When I went to my favorites I had forgotten what many of the sites were because there was no notes. For example I had some favorites that said "work stuff", which I had to open to remember what they were. I am a very visual learner and am also very visually organized and so delicious appealed to me right off the bat. I tagged several websites with the tag button, which moved the site to my delicious homepage. After I had several sites on the homepage I began to "bundle" them into groups of websites that are related to one another. For example (I am a bit of a celebrity news junkie) I have a bundle with all of the celebrity websites I go to everyday and then another bundle with all of the blogs I visit weekly. They are all organized and it feels like I have completely renovated and cleaned out my disaterous favorites section. One other aspect that I discovered is that your delicious account is public. This means that others can see and use my delcious sites for their own entertainment or education purposes. This scared me at first...I felt like it may be a bit intrusive if my friends were able to see all the junkie sites I visit. Then I realized how beneficial this tool could be. I could create a delicious site for the school library which included all of the resource sites I recommend to my students everday. My students could go to the social bookmarking site and have all the resources they need at their fingertips and I could even organize the resource sights into subjects.
Delicous is not the only social bookmarking site I found...some of the others include BlogMarks.net, delirious, Digg and scuttle.org. Most of the sites are similar, but have different ways of categorizing the sites you have tagged. Some of the social bookmarking sites, like Digg.com are based on a more specific type of sites. Digg.com is based on technology news and has combined that with social networking. Essentially they all work the same way and have the same advantages. I found delicious to be very user-friendly, maybe largely because the YouTube video showed me exactly how to use it. Delicious is the site that I will continue to use and I will incorporate it into my work and social lifee