Introduction to Social Bookmarking

del.icio.us and beyond

Betsy Norris, Shea Middle School English

 Social bookmarking is a web 2.0 tool that helps people to organize their links in a new way. It allows for advanced organization and collaboration in a way that simply wasn't possible with browser bookmarks or static lists of web links on a web page.

There are several social bookmarking sites on the web, but in this tutorial we will focus on the most established, del.icio.us.

(List of Social Bookmarking Sites )

Key terms:

• tag: a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information which enables keyword-based classification and search of information.
• folksonomy:  "the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content." by users, not experts! 
• metadata: "data about data." Old school: card catalog. 2.0: tags.
• bookmarklet: a browser bookmark that fuctions as a small application: i.e. allowing you to tag a URL add it  to del.icio.us or another site.

Applications for Educators:

• Organize your own web resources
• Share resources with students
• Explore new, publicly tagged resources
• Enable students to organize their web resources
• Enable students to share resources with each other
• Enable students to explore new, publicly tagged resources

Example of a teacher's del.icio.us page: Karen Feils's Best Web Pages (sharing resources with students, organizing her own web resources)

Tutorial:del.icio.us

Creating your own social bookmark page

1. Open del.icio.us
2. Click the "get started" link
3. Complete registration (email, password, security)
4. Click link in verification email
5. Install firefox extension
6. Restart firefox
7. buttons are now installed!
8. begin tagging! Any time you see a page you want to save, hit the "tag" button in your toolbar.
9. Don't forget to explore publicly tagged pages: i.e. pages publicly tagged with "education"
10. Your url is now del.cio.us/yourusername

To add friends and share links:

1. While logged in, click "your network"
2. On the left, enter the username of your friend (feel free to add me, username "msnorris")
3. To share a link with your friend tag it with "for:username"
4. Links shared with you will appear in the "links for you" section of your top toolbar.

citations

All wikipedia pages used are linked.

Creative Commons Image by flickrjunkie