Social Bookmarking Safari

My exploration of social bookmarking began several years ago when I began my first courses in SLIS. The pre-requisite 401 course opened my eyes to this amazing wave of online tools and resources. Among the resources highlighted was delicious. Since then I have dabbled in the tool, but have not used it consistently. For this assignment I welcomed starting with a clean slate and beginning a new account with the service. The sites I ended up bookmarking included:
• Glogster
• Guys Read
• Prezi
• Wikispaces
• ReadKiddoRead

Saving these was easy because the delicious page is so clutter-free that whatever you want to do on the page is identifiable. The tags were also a no-brainer because not only was I familiar with the sites, but delicious also gives suggestions from other users’ tags who have also bookmarked the sites. As I added more bookmarks delicious kept track of the top ten tags I had on the right hand side of the screen. Although it also gives the option of viewing all tags, I am able to quickly ascertain what type of bookmarks I have made. What is also nice about delicious is that I can get an RSS feed for all of the bookmarks I have identified.

I chose Prezi to determine if others have also bookmarked it. Delicious automatically displays the number of users who have saved it, however, after clicking on the numerical icon, in this case, 19,017, I am able to view the history of the bookmark. I can also see what notes people have made about the site, as well as what other tags have been associated with the site. If I select a user that has also added Prezi to their bookmarks, I can then see their entire list of bookmarks.

Searching for tags with delicious is simple. I searched for education, and then was able to filter the search results by video, for example. I also searched for 2.0 and book reviews. What is neither a positive or a negative aspect about this search feature is that delicious also provides a timeline starting from December 2002 until the present showing how many bookmarks have been saved under that particular tag. The best reason to use this service as opposed to other social bookmarking tools is the simplicity of the screen as well as the ease of use for adding and searching for sites to bookmark.

I wanted to compare delicious to Stumble Upon and boy, am I glad I did! From what I can tell, Stumble Upon is more of a place where a user can be directed to sites directly based upon a selected tag. For example, I selected education as a search criteria and was expecting to be provided with a list of sites tagged with education, however, I was sent to an NPR site that had an article from 2007 about an experimental high school. Stumble Upon then relies on my rating of the site in order to send me to another site. When I just selected the stumble option, I was sent to a video of a math teacher doing a shadow trick during class. Although it was entertaining, it was hard to manage where I went and where I was going next. I searched my two other tags, 2.0 and book reviews and was provided with a list of sites marked as favorites by Stumble Upon users. I could also narrow the search down to searching only in my selected friends’ favorites, or in my own list. Stumble Upon allows the search to be filtered by topics like delicious.

Diigo, the second social bookmarking tool I explored, was so very similar to delicious in its simple, clutter-free layout. It actually looks almost identical to delicious, except that Diigo offers a way to organize, share, and display specific bookmarks. When I searched for my tags, education, 2.0, and book reviews, I was provided with the option of searching by users who also tagged their bookmarks with those words. Unfortunately I was unable to find any sites with those tags, only people who associated their profiles with the tag education. The other two tags were a miss in coming up with search results that I could use to add people or sites to my “community.”

Overall, I prefer delicious hands down. It is easy to navigate, clutter-free, and user friendly. I can see myself using this tool in the future and will be interested in utilizing the other features it has, in addition to bookmarking.