Social Bookmarking

[Bonnie Dixon]

Social bookmarking is one of the most useful 'web 2.0' technologies for me and one I think could be really useful in libraries. Social bookmarking allows you to share sites you have bookmarked, or added as favourites with everyone. I use del.icio.us for my social bookmarking, but there are heaps of other sites that do the same thing, including ones from the major search engines. Social bookmarking is great from me to personally keep track of sites I may want to use, without having them get messed up in my web browser. The ability to tag the sites is great and makes them much easier to find form me. They can also be searched. This kind of bookmarking is great for me because I use a number of different computers, including several at work, my home one and library/university ones when I was studying. The other side of social bookmarking (obviously) is the social side - I like to see what other sites people are bookmarking and in theory searching a social bookmarking site gives you a more concentrated/useful web search (this does not always work out!). This kind of site could be really useful for sharing information and gathering group information for libraries. See my del.icio.us bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/eclecticlibrary