Social+bookmarking

=Social bookmarking=

//You work on different computers at school, at home, at your friend's house while you are doing research about starfish. You use the Favorites on the web browser, but that helps only if you come back to the same computer. You wish your Favorites could travel with you.//

//You are great at finding excellent websites on starfish, and you now have collected over 50 websites. The problem is, after a week or two you can't remember which one had the great piece about starfish in Thailand.//

//Imagine: You you find other people in the world who are doing research on starfish. They share what they find with each other, and you're able to look at all the websites they've collected.//

Social bookmarking is two things really. First, it's about **saving websites** (by creating bookmarks) to a place on the web that you can visit from anywhere. When you save a website, you add as many tags as you want to make it easy to find later (like starfish+Thailand). Second, **it's social**, because other people can see your bookmarks, and you can see other people's bookmarks. Because the bookmarks have tags, they're **easy to search**, and **easy to sort**. I have more than 2300 bookmarks, but I can find anything I want in about a minute.

A couple more great benefits are: You can see how many other people saved a website, which works a little like a **ranking for websites**: more saves means it's probably a better resource. You can **create networks** of users, so when you find a great website, you can send the bookmark immediately to a friend.

Still not sure? Watch this video from Common Craft:

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Other resources
del.icio.us worksheet
 * A delicious scavenger hunt!**

Mr. Hemingway's del.icio.us page : http://del.icio.us/themingway //These are all my bookmarks. Here you can see my newest bookmarks on the left, and on the right you can see all my tags. Click on a tag to see what happens.//

Mr. Hemingway's links tagged for 'del.icio.us' : http://del.icio.us/themingway/del.icio.us //These are all my bookmarks that have the tag "del.icio.us". That is, these are bookmarks for websites that talk about del.icio.us, mainly ideas about how to use this great tool.//

Mr. Hemingway's blog post about del.icio.us ([|link])

Wikipedia article on social bookmarking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarkingThe practice of creating your own tags for things, instead of using only the ones created by librarians, is called "folksonomy", that is, folk taxonomy. There's a whole field of research now about how informal ways of making categories, and how they reveal the ways that people think about the world. What do my tags tell you about me?