Things 13, 14 and 15 - Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking in Plain English
7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking

Tagging
What is Tagging? What's a Folksonomy?
Tag This - Examples and Overview of Tagging and Folksonomies (Commoncraft)
Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging

Organizing your digital resources through tagging is an advantageous way to keep track of the hundreds (thousands?) of sites one peruses and then hopes to find again someday. Tagging takes a lot of pressure off of the search process, thus making the search enjoyable again. Keep in mind that your tags are public and that this can be a disadvantage. Labeling your strange neighbor's turtle blog with "weirdo" or some other derogatory remark could come back to bite you. Also important to remember is that your public tags can provide very personal information about you, your interests, your favorite vacation spots, etc. Someone is watching and if you think "they're" not, you're fooling yourself.

Delicious
Searching Delicious
Create Your Delicious Account
Adding Bookmarks to Delicious

My Delicious

Seeing all of the Delicious advertisements disguised as tags was disappointing. Yuck. Registering and having to rework my password recipe was a pain, too. Mundane, well-known passwords were allowed but nothing obscure that included letters from my name, like "K." Yuck, again.

Two things come to mind when thinking about how social bookmarking can be used in teaching. With older students, where exposure is less critical, it would seem that "tag clouds" (a visual representing the occurrence of tags) could be used to show an archive of information for a particular research topic. With youngers, provided exposure could be limited, a classroom Delicious (so happy not to have to type de.li.cious, or is it del.ici.ious, or del.i.cious? anymore!) site would allow both students and teacher to contribute to an efficient use of the internet with enhanced productivity. Surely, there are 100s of uses in teaching.

RSS Revisited
News (and other) Feeds

• BBC
  
• Cooking Light
• NPR
• Washington Post

Subscribing to Tags
Organizing Feeds
RSS Feed Creation Tool

While I enjoy this aggregated information, remembering to check my feeds has not become a habit or an obsession. But when I'm there, I organize because I don't like "messy" technology. Understanding RSS is a relief and the benefits many.