Using online bookmarks/favorites

Social Bookmarking (del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon) are described at Wikipedia like this:

"Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service's features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, via a search engine, or even randomly."

Screen shot of a del.icio.us account page

The trick to using a site that uses tags rather than filing bookmarks into folders, is consistency in tagging or labeling. If a group were using one account, it would be good to work together on keyword definitions. (In itself, this is a good tool to practice determining and defining keywords.)

A "tag cloud" can be configured, and added to the side bar of a blog, or to a web page. The tag cloud at left is from the "PYPCDN" del.icio.us account. Anyone can tag a bookmark "for:pypcdn", and the administrator of the account then has the choice to accept and save the bookmark, or delete it.

Read this post (and watch the video from TeacherTube) on the 28 August blog that I wrote for another tech-day gathering.

This page at Mahalo, "How to use del.icio.us like a Pro", will show you everything you need to know about starting a del.icio.us account.

What a useful tool for an Exhibition group!