Social Bookmarking and flying through tag clouds

Okay, it was time to delve further into the powerful possibilities of sharing and learning via social bookmarking.

So I registered for Delicious and instantly made a big mistake, which was importing all favourites from my computer into bookmarks. Then I spent an inordinate amount of time deleting all of those of my various family members, those I didn’t think I would be returning to very often at all, and those I didn’t want others to see. I’ve just started to wrap my head around the idea that unless I specify otherwise, anyone can see what I’ve been looking at: I don’t think you need to know which fantasy hockey sites I’ve perused or which obscure music portals I’ve accessed, do you?
One of the next things I tried was checking out a tag cloud for popular tags, choosing social networking to see what could give me more information about bookmarking (which I added as another tag to narrow the search). Unfortunately, the first ones that popped up looked more like advertisements or promotional materials than useful sites.

But one site, D-Lib Magazine (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html), has published an article called Social Bookmarking Tools (I): A General Review (I found it through Delicious). This site offered some interesting insights which now seem obvious to me, such as the similarities between Delicious and Flickr: both are popular in part because of their sharing capabilities. It’s simple, easy and quick to connect with people, links and images. FFFFOUND! is another site that specializes in socially bookmarking images (http://ffffound.com/).

At any rate, the important point is that we don’t have to just look at any site Google sends us to, now we can choose from recommendations from others without even having to ask for them. In fact, we don’t need to always forward links to others if they are already a contact on Delicious, because they can check out our bookmarks whenever they like. The D-Lib Article also included an interesting point about how views about learning, reading and writing are changing. In the old days, we couldn’t necessarily share our sources – we didn’t all have the same books or journals; all we could do was cite our references.

“Why spill any ink (digital or not) in rewriting what someone else has already written about instead of just pointing at the original story and adding the merest of titles, descriptions and tags for future reference?” (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html)

Of course, one of the drawbacks of social networking as I have seen so far is the problem of social networkers using different tags for the same links. If those we are sharing with don’t use same tags, the system falls apart and we revert to searching, skimming and scanning. The writers of the D-Lib magazine article think that there are ways to improve upon this problem, but it hasn’t happened yet:

"Anecdotal evidence (see Jon Udell's screencast on del.icio.us [23]) supports the view that there is a natural tendency towards the convergence of tags. Strategies to facilitate this development are also possible. In a blog entry entitled 'Folksonomies: How we can improve the tags' [24], Lars Pind has suggested various possibilities including the following: a) 'suggest tags for me', b) 'find synonyms automatically', c) 'help me use the same tags others use', d) 'infer hierarchy from the tags', and e) 'make it easy to adjust tags on old content'. Currently only option e) appears to be in common use, presumably because it is the easiest to implement. (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html)

I think the possibilities put forth by Pind above would be very helpful for myself as well as for students. At http://teachingtoday.glencoe.com/howtoarticles/social-bookmarking I learned that some "bookmarking sites allow members to rank the site’s usefulness as well.” On Delicious you can see how many other people have bookmarked sites but I haven't found rankings I'd like to see yet.

Another bookmarking site I’ve started to check out is Digg.



As I understand it, Digg essentially lets a user submit sites they think are good. According to the site, “Digg is democratizing digital media. As a user, you participate in determining all site content by discovering, selecting, sharing, and discussing the news, videos, and podcasts that appeal to you.” (http://digg.com/how) I can see how you could build a network through which fruitful collaboration could be gained, so far I don’t see it as being as useful as Delicious. One of the simple tests I’ve started using to check out a new site such as this one is to search for a really obscure musical artist who happens to be one of my favourites (his name is Robyn Hitchcock). Delicious came up with 180 results, Digg none. Clearly this is not a scientific test or a breaking point in whether or not I use the site, but Delicious seems more useful at this point anyway.

Stumbleupon is another site I had heard of but never tried (http://www.stumbleupon.com/tag/stumbleuopn/). Like Digg, this site works on users rating other sites, but it also seems to be more of a bookmarking site as well. Essentially, you can filter by tags, look at another user’s rating of a site, rate it yourself, and see some other recommendations based on Stumbleupon’s search engine all on the same page. It also passed my Robyn Hitchcock test, but so far the site still seems like one built for specified surfing more than a true social bookmarking, sharing, collaborative site like Delicious. Both Digg and Stumbleupon are colourful, graphically pleasing sites that might be realy appealing to those younger than I or anyone who needs visual stimulation. Delicious is aesthetically simple, which I don't mind, but I think Digg and Stumbleupon are going to be popular with students beacuse of their visual appeal and their thumbs up/thumbs down rating schemes.

The obvious uses of bookmarking sites like Delicious are ones I should be able to use right away with my students. I don’t have to give them a bunch of urls or links if I can just show them bookmarks. But the real collaboration will be when they bookmark sites they’ve found and share them. I will easily be able to see which ones they deem worthy of sharing, so I’ll be able to find out some good information about their ability to evaluate websites (and I can do this on an individual and class basis). As long as we’re using the same tags, we’ll be sailing, and many of us will be able to access our bookmarks from home. This aspect of teacher/class collaboration is what excites me the most, because student ownership, authority and confidence are definitely areas I need to foster in my classes.

Furthermore, I can see some eye-opening experiences could be gained by working with classes from other schools. Once students start to see that they’re adding to a knowledge base outside of their own school, the exhilaration I’m feeling with the possibilities of social bookmarking, sharing and collaborating now will hopefully be passed on to them.