Have you ever created a word or excel document with a bunch of website addresses, just so you wouldn’t forget them all? Have you ever sent a friend or colleague a bunch of links that you ran across, because you knew it was right up their alley? Is it getting hard for you to manage the hundreds of bookmarks that you saved on browser? Well… then you were working a lot harder than you have to! Online bookmarking makes all of this easier. And, as a doctoral student that spends a lot of time finding resources on the web, this has helped me to stay sane… and even be helpful to other researchers in my field.

Here is an excerpt by Lisa Pickoff-White from our Participatory Media Guidebook, which I describe in the last blog, explaining what bookmarking is and how to use it to make your life easier.

Definition
Bookmarking is a system where people work together to bring together articles and works throughout the Internet by tagging them. For example, people can vote on something if it is informative as a suggestion for others to read it, or add it to a list of articles on the same topic.

My Favorite Examples
Del.icio.us, Digg

Why use it?
Sites such as Digg receive about 20 million hits a month. People who find something via social bookmarking are also more likely to trust the source, because it has been pre-approved by a human, instead of a list generated by a search engine. It’s also any easy way for people to check out what their friends are reading, and stumble across your site that way.

Sites such as Del.icio.us can be really helpful in saving, organizing, managing, and categorizing all of the websites that you want to remember. It’s easy to share tags through digg and find key websites by looking at others’ use of the same tag. Del.icio.us also allows you to see all of your bookmarks online, so you can access them and add to them from any computer.

Use Cases: Videovoice Example
Check out Caricia’s del.icio.us tag on all of the websites on “videovoice” that she has come across during the last 5 months. Here is a tag cloud of all her tags, including videovoice and dozens more, that she has used.

How to use
Sign up of an account at one of the social bookmarking sites above. Most of them will insert a toolbar, so whenever you see something relevant to your organization, tag-it!

Helpful/Interesting Links

• A general review of Social Bookmarking Tools (from D-Lib Magazine)
• Digg’s failing democracy (from the Download Squad)

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 4:02 pm and is filed under Book/Article Review, CBPR Tips, Conceptual Roots, Introduction, VideoVoice News.