Social Bookmarking - Week 4

This week's assignment was to check out the social bookmarking site del.icio.us. I know there are other social bookmarking sites, but I have yet to check them out. It's difficult to judge social bookmarking as a whole at this point in time. But at least I have an idea of how it works. Before this course I had no idea what social bookmarking was. Now that I have had a taste of it, I'm willing to check out some others in the near future.

It seems that del.icio.us is quite simple to use. The tagging takes on a whole new world. One can check out other sites others have tagged by typing in a search term. One example I tried was "birding." I wanted to see what other web sites are tagged by that term and how many people have tagged those sites. For instance, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's web site has been tagged and saved by over 300 people using the term "birding."

Another site that I saved was MedlinePlus, using the terms health, medical, reference, medicine, drugs, encyclopedia, Government, database, and consumer_health. Surprisingly there are 1845 others who have also tagged and saved it. That certainly is an impressive number.

I can see how social bookmarking can be an advantage over bookmarking on one's own browser. It's nice to know that you can be other places to check on something and know that your bookmarks can "travel" with you.

Would I use it professionally, in the hospital library? Maybe. It would be nice to socially bookmark all of the web sites I presently have bookmarked in Internet Explorer. But then, I don't see any reason for using those sites or bookmarks other than when I'm at work. But, then again, it would be quite interesting to see how many others have bookmarked the same sites and if they have any extra notes written about any of them.