From SOLR Wiki

Contents 1 Purpose for the session 2 Social Bookmarking - so what is it? 3 Why Use a Social Bookmarking Service? 4 Some Good Choices for Social Bookmarking Services 4.1 Hosted 4.2 Software 5 Other Ways you can Benefit from a Social Bookmark Network 6 Academic Uses of Social Bookmarks 7 Other Wacky Uses of Social Bookmarks 8 The network is the people

Purpose for the session

• kick off the "brown bag lunch talks" series
• for anyone not yet familiar, introduce social bookmarking
• for anyone who is already familiar
  • introduce some innovations built on top of social bookmarking
  • model a way of working with them that can boost your knowledge

Social Bookmarking - so what is it?

• Simply put - storing your "bookmarks" or "favourites" online instead of on your computer/in your browser
• Example - del.icio.us
• Typically facilitated via "bookmarklets" or a browser plugin that makes adding news ones as simple as adding them within your browser

Why Use a Social Bookmarking Service?

• Bookmarks are not linked to any specific computer or even browser, can be accessed from anywhere
• Annotatable
• Searchable
• Viewable by others through NO additional effort
• "Polite" way to send colleagues URLs, and also share stuff with people you don't realize might have been interested
• Tagging!
• See what other's are bookmarking too
• Adds to the WWW's value

Some Good Choices for Social Bookmarking Services

Hosted

• del.icio.us
• connotea
  • specifically good if you are a researcher/Academic as it outputs in formal citation formats (e.g. MLA, APA, specific jouransl etc.)

• furl
  • older tool, but innovative as it creates a local archive of every page you bookmark for future reference

• stumbleupon
  • very interesting site that offers a toolbar to navigate to other related sites of interest.

• diigo
  • annotation and "group" functionality

Software

• Crowdtrust
  • UBC-developed, supports "groups" and can send "memos" via service

• scuttle
  • open source del.icio.us knock-off; actually supports the del.icio.us API meaning all the 3rd party tools/hacks are available

• Connectbeam
  • social bookmarking+++, adds networking, profiles, contrained search. "Enterprise" app. $$$

Other Ways you can Benefit from a Social Bookmark Network

• As a reader/searcher
  • Follow a topic via RSS - cf. http://del.icio.us/tag/uportal or http://del.icio.us/tag/bccampus
  • access the wisdom of your network - your 'network' feed - http://del.icio.us/network/nessman

• As a bookmarker
  • linkrolls - http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls
  • tagclouds - http://del.icio.us/help/tagrolls

Academic Uses of Social Bookmarks

• URLs for course readings
  • this instructor stored all of their course readings in del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/cpjobling/eg-259) and then was able to present reading lists anywhere using Grazr - cf. http://crispyj2.blogspot.com/2007/09/building-course-reading-list-in-grazr.html

• as an exercise to create a collaborative knowledge base (share tags)
• students building their own knowledge network

Other Wacky Uses of Social Bookmarks

• Jon Udell - tag yourself - http://del.icio.us/judell/jonudell
• Tony Hirst - del.icio.us as slideshow engine, delishow - [ http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/006041.html http://blogs.open.ac.uk/Maths/ajh59/006041.html]
  • example at http://ouseful.open.ac.uk/deliShow/psychemedia/feedthru

• del.icio.us constrained search - [ http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5BiciiOz2xGc28CWpRr.og]
• del.icio.us and group research via tags (e.g. hz08 mine - all)

Because it supports a public API (and REST interface) a huge number of interesting 3rd party tools have also been developed for del.icio.us

• Deliciousspy - http://www.ajaxonomy.com/deliciousspy/  (imagine this for students across BC)
• cloud.lic.io.us - http://www.messinglink.com/?page_id=3  (for Mac Users - OS X desktop tagclouds)
• A huge list can be found at http://web2.econsultant.com/social-bookmarking-services.html 

The network is the people

• demonstrate the "my network" feed effect - http://del.icio.us/network/nessman 
  • this is my network. It doesn't have to be the same as yours.
  • But the extent to which we use the same system, or use systems that we can aggregate, we can start to share some intelligence

• Ultimately, as with any social system, it's value increases in relation to its number of nodes (and especially nodes which are relevant to you)
  • cf. Metcalfe's Law  and Reed's Law 

Interested? You can start anytime. I'm http://del.icio.us/nessman. Or we can investigate one of the other options above.