Social Bookmarking

From RSCWMWiki

www.delicious.com is a popular social bookmarking tool

Introduction

Many people use social bookmarking tools to share links to useful resources with friends and work colleagues. This article introduces you to the concept of social bookmarking and helps you get started with the social bookmarking site of your choice, either as a viewer or a provider of bookmarks.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking tools allow you to manage a collection of links (or bookmarks) to web-based resources, which you value and want to share with others. Unlike your Web browser favourites, these aren't stored on your PC, but on a social bookmarking web site, so you can access them from anywhere and also share them with others. Unlike file-sharing tools like repositories, a social-bookmarking web site doesn't actually save the resources themselves, but simply links to them.

Tagging

When adding resources to your collection of bookmarks it is important you add metadata to describe the resource and why it's valuable to yourself and others. Most social bookmarking tools allow you to add a few sentence descriptions of each resource, as well as tagging them with keywords, which accurately reflect the content of each resource. The better this metadata, the more easily you'll be able to find the resources in your collection and the more visible they'll be to others. Tagging is a bit like creating an index for a book - the more time you spend on it, the easier it is to get to the page you want.

Why social?

Social bookmarking is social because it allows you to share the resources you value and you can also benefit from other people's collections. The easiest way to share your collection is to publicise the web link of your collection and also its RSS feed. Most social bookmarking sites also allow you to search everyone's collection in one go, very much like a search engine. This will give you a different set of results to a general search engine, as the content has all been added to the site because somebody values it.

Getting started

Choose one of the social bookmarking services from the selection of popular sites below and register, Citeulike is particularly recommended for scholarly purposes. You may wish to start by importing some of the favourites from your Web browser - this is possible with most of the sites. If you'd like to view someone else's content, you can search many of the sites like a search engine or subscribe to topics which interest you.

Some web sites have in-built tools so you can easily bookmark resources as you browse their content, one example is the BBC web site

Matt Gallon of RSC West Midlands has an account with the Delicious social bookmarking site, more details below: