Social bookmarking

Most people are familiar with collecting and storing bookmarks in their browsers, known as "Favorites" or "Bookmarks". However, social bookmarking is about collecting and storing bookmarks online and then sharing them with others. An extra aspect of social bookmarking is that the bookmarks can be tagged, this means categorising or describing them using keywords defined by the user, which means that they then become searchable by others.

Take a look at this video from CommonCraft called Social Bookmarking in Plain English, which explains the principles behind social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking can be used to support a wide range or formal or informal learning activities.

Here are a couple of articles that look at social bookmarking in specific contexts

    * Educational possibilities of social bookmarking
          o 7 things you should know about social bookmarking, Educause, May 2005
    * Use of social bookmarking in the corporate world.
          o Social bookmarking: pushing collaboration to the edge, Shamus McGillicuddy, CIO.com, 21 June 2006

Social bookmarking tools

There are a large number of social bookmarking tools but here are two popular tools: Delicious and diigo

Delicious - www.delicious.com - is a very popular social bookmarking tool.

You can search Delicious for links on a subject of interest, without loggin in. This is a useful way of finding resources that are popular on a given topic (rather than say searching for them in Google), as you will see the number of times the link has been saved. The best resources will therefore rise to the top. For guidance on using delicious to discover websites, take a look at the Guide to Discovering bookmarks.
You can store your own bookmarks online, and mark any that you wish as "private". To do so you will need to have an account on Delicious. When you sign up you can also install two buttons for your browser toolbar, so that you can quickly bookmark them when you are moving around the web. Simply add a web page to Delicious by clicking the "tag" button on the toolbar and enter the details in the box that opens.
You can share your bookmarks with others by giving people the link to your public bookmarks, e.g. http://delicious.com/username. For more information about sharing, take a look at the Delicious Guide to Sharing Bookmarks
You can create a library of links by agreeing on a tag that you and others will use, so tht they will appear together. You will then need to subscribe to that tag
You can access Delicious on your mobile. Delicious Mobile enables you to sign into your account and browse your bookmarks, tags, inbox, and other data. You can also browse popular and recent bookmarks and tags from the Delicious community : m.delicious.com

Articles about using Delicious for social bookmarking can be found in the delicious Reading List.

Diigo - www.diigo.com - is another popular bookmarking tool. However, it is more than just bookmarking, and is described as a powerful research tool. Here you don't just bookmark tools, you can highlight them and annotate them, and it is easy to create groups to pool reserarch about a porject.

Here are a couple of resources by Jose Picardo on how to use diigo

Annotating and sharing links with your students using Diigo, Box of Tricks, 14 March 2009
This video shows you how to annotate using diigo.

Further reading:

Directory Listing: Social Bookmarking tools