Social BookMarking

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If you do not understand how social bookmarking works watch this video.

Delicious could be the most popular and most used social bookmarking site. I have used Delicious Bookmarking for more than three years and have hundreds of extremely valuable web sites bookmarked. Delicious is a great Web 2.0 tool for bookmarking, sharing and searching web sites.

Yahoo recently sold Delicious to YouTube. In my Delicious account there were technical issues in the transition of Delicious from Yahoo to YouTube There are many tags missing from my personal tag list. Only the first page of personal tags are available. There should be around 7 pages of personal tags listed. The missing tags make the Delicious account much less effective. The saved web pages appear to remain listed as in the previous account. With some time and work I can retag the pages and it will be as good as new. However the technical instability is troublesome. Delicious interface now looks different but evidently operates as it did previously . The Insider has a small story titled “Delicious finds a New Owner ” which gives information about YouTube’s purchase and takeover of Delicious. In this article, there is a link solid alternatives that gives “6 Solid Alternatives to Delicious”. There are some very good bookmarking options in this list. Historio.us and Mr. Wong appear to have great potential in fulfilling bookmarking needs, however these book marking sites are pricy. Google Bookmarks and Diigo also look good and these are totally free.

Bookmarking for the library has great potential. For example, libraries can use bookmarking as a type of cataloging method for web sites. The Article titled Free and Open Source Options for Creating Database-Driven Subject Guides discusses the use of social bookmarking in Libraries and provides a link to The College of New Jersey, French Studies website which is an example of social bookmarking used in libraries. This article also raises the question of potential problems with libraries relaying on potential third party web sites such as Delicious. “Another concern about using del.icio.us that has been raised by Meredith Farkas (2007) and some other librarians is the inherent danger of relying on a free, third-party service for core functionality of a Web site. While it is unlikely that del.icio.us will disappear anytime soon, the risks associated “with del.icio.us being a third-party service can be mitigated by exporting your data – with the API, the RSS & JSON feeds, and in standard browser-bookmarks-format – to make a backup copy of your guides on your Website” (Gustafson, 2007).”

3 thoughts on “Social BookMarking”

  1. Thanks for providing some more alternatives. I’ve used Delicious but haven’t been a huge fan. I agree that the idea is sound, however, and look forward to playing with some of the websites you mentioned!

  2. I liked your video addition to this post, it helped with my understanding of how Delicious works. I am a bit perturbed to hear that you lost your tags, and that it is possible to lose content that you publish on the Internet. I suppose I should not be, especially after so many years of losing content through computer malfunctions and learning how to backup my files to prevent that. No technology is infallible.

  3. Hi David,

    Thanks for posting a very informative video from U Tech Tips which I’d never heard of before but see that it full of valuable educational information and also for suggesting Google Bookmarks and Diigo.

    I agree that social bookmarking has enormous potential for libraries but I also have concern over security issues and using third party web sites – especially if they are free. As noted by Farkas that third party web sites can be “perfect targets for vandals and spammers” (p. 72) and for hackers, libraries must use social media and bookmarking tools with caution.

    At present I am in Thailand and aside from the worst flooding disaster the country has experienced in fifty years, the kingdom had a different type of disaster. Last week, Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s Twitter account was hacked which created quite a scandal in the country. It shows the vulnerability of social media even when sophisticated security measures are used. The article also has some interesting statistics on Facebook and Twitter users in Thailand.

    http://www.bangkokpost.com/business/telecom/259762/hunting-the-hackers

    ~ William