Week The Fourth. Creating order from chaos - social bookmarking

This week my aim was to explore social bookmarking for the first time and get a basic working knowledge of what it offers, and its relevance to our personal and professional lives.

Delicious

My group discussed why you would use Delicious over browser bookmarking. We were struggling to think what benefits it could possibly offer that would make it worth the time and effort getting to know yet another new program when browsers offer bookmarking.

It is impressive that Delicious proclaims it offers 'over a billion links served daily to more than 200 countries worldwide'. It isn't just websites, either – you can bookmark music, videos, blogs and pictures. 

Browsing through other people's collections is an added dimension also, as you're not just browsing the internet by yourself, you're browsing the interests of an interactive community.

I installed the 'Add to Delicious' bookmarklet simply by dragging it up to my toolbar, which then allows easy tagging and bookmarking of websites. The ability to add your own comments and tags are great options, especially if using the bookmark in a research or professional capacity, and the ability to keep your bookmarks private is also a good addition for keeping your personal and public personas separate.

Privacy option = good. Maybe I don't want everyone knowing there is a sleepy Harry Styles waiting for me in my Delicious account...

I like the 'Discover' option in Delicious which gives you a wide selection of websites to trawl through to see what takes your fancy. Apparently it is based on your interests, so the more you tag and bookmark, the more your interests are honed.

Initially, Jeremy and I decided to 'follow' each other, but couldn't see anywhere in the interface that then allowed you to see your followers. Eventually we discovered it was just a refreshing issue, as Jeremy found that when he reloaded the page there was a little notification at the top of the page that he had a new follower. Followers then appear on the 'Remember' tab, on the left side of the screen, under your profile picture. Thank goodness for the buddy system!

Delicious iPhone Interface

In my ongoing effort to immerse myself in as much new Web 2.0 technology that I can, I also downloaded the Delicious app for iPhone, which helpfully gives you a mini tutorial when you sign in. I can see myself becoming addicted to reading through my links and discovering new articles when I'm stuck on public transport or find myself with a spare moment.





I set up a Diigo account also, and found that the extra option to highlight certain sections of a page that you want to remember is something that Delicious doesn't offer, which gives Diigo a slight advantage in my opinion. It even advertises its difference by giving itself the label 'Web highlighter'. 

I was very interested in trying GuruLib as I was intrigued about the ability to input barcodes via your webcam and retrieve details of your books and music from online sites, but unfortunately it is offline. 

This brings up further concerns for me, especially after the discontinuation of Google Reader – what happens to your meticulously collected personal data if your favourite social bookmarking site goes down? Interestingly, I found this blog that has not been updated since 10 February 2010: 

February 4, 2010

'Last month, GuruLib was down for almost 2 weeks due to certain unexpected events. First, the server went down due to network card failure and then I had to leave my current apartment. To keep my hosting cost low, I have been running GuruLib from my home internet account. Until I was able to settle on a new place I had no way to get the server online. I am sorry that I did not effectively communicate the outage to the users. I hope to do a better job about that in future'.

And also this one, from July 24, 2009:
'My hotmail account is compromised. Over the last 2 years I had corresponded with several GuruLib users through my hotmail account. Some of their email address (sic) was stored in my contact list. Today when I checked my email, I found out that I have become the victim of an email scam'.


Perhaps this is a good lesson – to research and be aware of who exactly is running the products/companies/platforms you use to create your personal databases and libraries, to ensure greater piece of mind regarding stability, longevity and privacy concerns, and to avoid this:


Rosario D: When will www.gurulib.com work again? I have my entire book collection on www.gurulib.com. 

Abe George: After spending a lot of time entering all my books into gurulib database and scanning the cover images when it was not available, I don't want to see the site just disappearing??

Here is a list of similar sites to GuruLib, for further research.

I think Library Thing looks a bit clunky and old-fashioned

I set up a Library Thing account and immediately was not a fan of its old and clunky-looking interface and the time required to input books and write reviews. I explored a little more in-depth and was impressed that it takes the social angle to a new level by listing local events and libraries on your page, and it shows you users with similar online libraries to yours.

There are author information pages for books that you own, which have a wiki-like construction where you can edit details, and visit various pages connected to that author.

This also contributes to making Library Thing a very social and engaging platform, as does the groups function. I think this is a very powerful tool – I can see that a very useful application of the groups function would be that a library could start their own group and very quickly have a socially interactive zone for connection.

Faviki didn't want me to join...

Finally, I wanted to explore Faviki a little to see how useful it is to convert your own tags to more universally-defined tags from firstly Wikipedia, then the whole web. 

It appears to be taking tagging in a different direction again from Delicious and Diigo. After watching the introduction videos on the website, Faviki feels to me like the world of wikis is possibly taking a mini-step closer to using at least one form of a more controlled, universal language instead of arbitrary input from many differently skilled users. 

The idea of making your tags universal allows greater social interaction as you're all on the same page, which makes bookmarking and referencing even easier.

Interestingly, when I tried to join Faviki, I could not load the page in either Chrome or Internet Explorer - there is a blank page every time I click the 'join' button. Also, the official Faviki blog appears not to have been updated since 13 March, 2010.

Tweeting, questioning...

Suave profile pic, Vuk!

So I used my newbie research skills, deciding to further my goal of using and learning about Web 2.0 tools and I turned to Twitter! 

I found the author of Faviki, Vuk Miličić, on Twitter, and decided to tweet at him regarding my inability to join Faviki. 

Still exciting seeing my tweets in the timeline of world snippets

At the time of posting this blog, I had not received any reply from Vuk. 

In conclusion, making bookmarks the 'old way' in a browser for use on one computer seems completely archaic to me after my learning activities with social bookmarking this week, especially as many people are now using multiple devices for work, uni and home.

I found all of the tools I explored this week easy to use, which increases their longevity and their application for both personal and professional use.

The idea of tagging that Diigo, Delicious and Faviki offer in order to create informative links of information that others can benefit from is very social, and being able to save websites for future reading and assignment research on-the-go is extremely useful in our information-rich modern world. 

The mission statement of Delicious - that they exist to focus on 'curation and discovery', really sums up for me exactly the appeal, function and relevance of social bookmarking tools.