Five Social Reasons to Use Social Bookmarking

Posted by Alison Aldrich on October 28th, 2008 Posted in: Technology

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After you’ve made the switch from browser-based bookmarking to social bookmarking, here are some ways to maximize the social potential of your bookmarks.

1.       Find like-minded individuals.

When you bookmark something socially, you can see how many others have bookmarked the same resource. Clicking through to other users’ bookmark lists (and exploring the tags they use) can reveal useful sites you might have missed in your web searches.

2.       Join a group.

Some social networking services (Furl is an example) allow users to organize themselves into interest groups. Group members contribute bookmarks to a common pool and communicate with each other in discussion forums. For example, here is a group for Furl users interested in Libraries.

Connotea is a social bookmarking tool for clinicians and research groups. It integrates nicely with PubMed, pulling in bibliographic information as well as links to citations. Think about how Connotea or a similar tool could be used to enhance an in-person journal club, or to facilitate an online journal club. Here is a review of Connotea by medical librarian Melissa Rethlefsen.

3.       Share links without becoming a nuisance.

Do you have a friend or colleague who loves to e-mail you every time she sees a link you might find interesting? Maybe that friend is YOU? Social bookmarking allows you to benefit from your friend’s generosity (or to share as many links as you please) without creating more e-mail for anyone to manage. For example, when I want to share a link with fellow delicious user Maryanne Blake, I add the tag:

for:blakema

Maryanne will see the link and any comments I’ve written about it the next time she signs in to delicious.

Another way to share links is by using mutually agreed upon tags. For example, if there is a Web 2.0 resource you would like to recommend to Medical Library Association members, bookmark it in delicious and add the tag: mlaweb2.0  To see what other MLA members are tagging, go to:

http://delicious.com/tag/mlaweb2.0

4.       Share links on your organization’s web page or blog.

Delicious provides Linkrolls and Tagrolls as options for sharing recently bookmarked links on your own web page or blog. A number of libraries have experimented with Linkrolls and Tagrolls as ways to keep their pages updated with new, fresh content. For example, see CSU-Pueblo Library or Holdredge Area Public Library.

Maybe you would like to provide research guides or pathfinders but are discouraged from getting started because of the time and effort it would take to maintain extra web pages. Social bookmarking tools allow you to assemble research guides in practically no time at all. Look at the delicious links from North Metro Technical College Librarian. On the right side of the screen, you will see tag bundles for each of the college’s academic programs. This delicious page is linked from the library’s main web page under the heading “Resources related to YOUR program of study.”

5.       See what’s being bookmarked at the RML.

Check out Alison’s bookmarks, Nikki’s bookmarks, Gail’s bookmarks, Maryanne’s bookmarks, and Patricia’s bookmarks. We’d love to know what you’re bookmarking, too! If you are a delicious user, add us to your network.

We also make it easy for you to bookmark NN/LM resources. Have you noticed this graphic in the upper right corner of NN/LM pages?

Click on it to share the page in delicious or on any of 33 other social sites.

For More Information:

Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us

7 Things You Should Know About Social Bookmarking

A Little More Help From My Friends: Social Bookmarking