Social networking and social bookmarking in Dubai, a by-product of the Web 2.0 era allows users to voice their thoughts over the internet and interact with each other better, socially as well as professionally. Most networking sites like BlogMemes, Reddit and Badoo feature handy tools like discussion boards, communities or groups on particular interests, access to a member’s blog page, and review boards.

Social bookmarking in Dubai, which is actually part of social media marketing strategies, is one of the techniques utilized by SEO experts in Dubai. This strategy allows businesses and marketers to promote their brands by displaying them on different social media networks like StumbleUpon, Reddit, Digg, etc.

The tag and ranking options provided on such sites allow the content of a website to be displayed in search engine result pages. The crawlers pick out the targeted keywords and business names, which occur in the discussions that are either threaded or linked to. The more often a page is linked or ranked, the better its chances of a higher search engine positioning.

There are a lot of forums, blogs and even websites that feature icons below articles or photos or random content. These icons allow a user to tag or bookmark the part of a page he finds interesting. It is then featured on his profile in the social networking or bookmarking site he belongs to. Users visiting his site can also view the bookmarked pages and do the same, thus widening the audience.

Such options are more relevant as they do away with classifications worked out by mechanical web crawlers that are on no account as accurate as humans.

Cosmos Star Consultants, a professional online marketing company makes use of social bookmarking in Dubai to boost your website’s visibility.

In addition, I noticed a lot of similarities between blogging sites, microblogging sites, and social networks. These similarities include:

• They require an email to login and/or create an account.
   
• The sites make it easy to create an account. There is a distinct and obvious spot to click on to join the network.

• They all try to make the site seem easy to use. This is because humans are typically drawn to things that seem easy. If the network appears easy to use, people are more likely to actively use it.

Image by Nelson Zotto Rivaz Photography via Flickr

I think the key word, according to one of my compatriots, would be overwhelmed.  Not in the sense that I, personally, was overwhelmed.  More that I think the participants were.  Or at least that's what they seemed to be saying.  Personally, I see this as a good thing.  If you come to a conference expecting anything different, you are missing the point.  Your brain SHOULD hurt at the end of the day!  That is actually one of my favorite parts of it all.  Conferences should challenge you.  They should make you think.  They should give you pause to reconsider your methods and actions.  They should pry your mind back open a bit and then dump more stuff in for you to chew on.  Shouldn't they?

I got a chance to meet and chat with our keynote speaker (who met with rave reviews by the way!), Kevin Honeycutt.  Kevin is a wonderful advocate for education in the state of Kansas and beyond.  Check out his Podcasts and current projects like Art Snacks on his blog.  I enjoy talking to people who THINK about education and DREAM about what it can be.  I find myself falling more and more into that category.  There is too much potential in our kids not to challenge it and dare to dream a bit.  It just involves us stepping outside the comfort zone a bit.  Thanks Kevin!

My presentations- I always worry when I present that I am cramming too much information in.  I get pretty passionate about the topics I research so when I present them I have to be careful not to just spew a stream of consciousness out and end up blowing everyone out of their chairs.  This conference was no different.  The two presentations that I think I may have overloaded a bit were my RSS class and the Social Bookmarking session.  There is a lot of stuff in there when you are trying to explain the concept, tools and uses in an hour or less!  My participants were engaged, if a bit wide eyed by the whole thing and asked lots of good questions.  Ran into the same old problem/excuse though...  "How do I make a list of safe websites using Diigo if my school blocks DIIGO?"  *sigh*

The participants-  Although they seemed a tiny bit quiet compared to the usual rowdy crowd, they were interested and thoughtful.  Although we may have overwhelmed them a little, they kept at it all the way to the end, with the last sessions being as full as the first ones were.  The conversations were fun and the questions were right on.  I love it when my participants make me think.

The conference-  We tried something this year for the first time.  We provided a dedicated area (manned most of the time) for participants to sit and specifically network and share ideas.  We also offered some short sessions that competed directly with the main sessions.  Although the sessions were lightly attended (OK, only one of mine actually had people), what it actually did promote was a comfortable, informal place to ask more questions.  I really hope we keep doing this because it seemed as if people really liked it.  It was fun for me because I got to present and demonstrate on a big 32" plasma while sitting in a nice, comfy chair...!

One final note I will share was a part of my chat with Kevin and a later conversation I had with another trainer.  We (the trainer and I) worried that perhaps we are still too far ahead in the information we deliver to our participants.  That, perhaps, we overestimated the level of technical sophistication in Missouri education and that is why our participants seemed overwhelmed.  On the same note, when Kevin and I were talking, he asked if I had submitted any presentations for NECC this year.  I admitted a lack of professional confidence in submitting at such a huge event and felt that I didn't have much to offer.  My assumption was that most of the participants at this conference were way above the level my presentations are written at.  I also feel that NECC presentations are more project specific.  Kevin disagreed.  He feels that, although there are a number of technology "bleeders" (he thinks it's about 10% in most places) at the big conferences, most participants are just like the rest of us and could benefit from this information.

I think may have slipped into that trap of cross targeting my presentations.  Trying to load them with stuff for the "bleeders" and then attempting to explain it all to a beginner audience.  Since part of my job is to research this stuff, I naturally gain a higher level of expertise and then I assume everybody must know as much about it as me.  But of all the people in my sessions, I would guess that LESS than 10 % were "bleeders".  Most were beginners and a few were just curious and had no intention of trying what I was showing them.  So I think I need to do a couple of things.

First,  I need to adapt my presentations a bit to answer more of the "why" questions and even the "what" questions (i.e.  What is it?).  Then improve my bag of tricks so that I can adapt up if my audience requires it.  Personally, I think this will slowly change, especially with the Web 2.0 tools.  Web 2.0 is still in it's infancy.  As it grows and more people get used to it, the level of sophistication will grow.

Second, I need to submit this stuff everywhere.  Why?  Because I believe in it and think I have something to share that benefits the education community.  And besides, how else are people going to get more into this stuff if SOMEBODY doesn't teach them?

Speaking of which, I'm off to present on the basics of blogs and wikis tomorrow!  And then I travel down to the wilds of Southern Missouri to teach Web 2.0 basics to librarians.  heh... I'm completely out of control...

Sorry for the ramble... I have a large case of brain fry...

8 Simple Tools for Better Bookmarking by Adam DuVander.

The author mentions an upcoming Twine and predicts that this social bookmarking site will be the top of next year's list. I think that this site bears looking into . . . (Of course which I am more than happy to investigate.)

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1640743&w=425&h=350&fv=height%3D350%26width%3D425%26file%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fflvideo%2F7234.flv%E2%84%91%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fthumb%2F7234.jpg%26location%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fplayer%2Fsearch%2Fmediaplayer.swf%26logo%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fimages%2Fgreylogo.swf%26searchlink%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fteachertube.com%2Fsearch_result.php%253Fsearch_id%253D%26frontcolor%3D0xffffff%26backcolor%3D0x000000%26lightcolor%3D0xFF0000%26screencolor%3D0xffffff%26autostart%3Dfalse%26volume%3D80%26overstretch%3Dfit%26link%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fview_video.php%3Fviewkey%3D3e17aa176019eafac82a%26linkfromdisplay%3Dtrue%26recommendations%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.teachertube.com%2Fembedplaylist.php%3Fchid%3D63]

In total, over the last 3 years whilst building HealthEngine I have been exploring how social and professional networking works. Trying to develop a better understanding of how individuals interact and network online; how individuals and groups develop 'trust' of each other and the web domain to which they are entrusting sometimes very personal information.

At the same time I have the great honor and privilege of 'networking' and interacting with a wide range of interesting, enigmatic, energetic and inimitable personalities. Slowly an Australian online networking community is beginning to develop but at a 'less trusting' and tentative rate then other countries.

Hopefully this experience will help me to develop online education learning initiatives with vibrant and interested people...time will tell. Today I want to highlight some of the 'professional' networking sites which have been the most benefit in creating and maintaining a circle of trust within a virtual community.

Advice to 'would-be' professional networkers, wishing to dip their toe in the world of pixelated communications is to

• Define your objectives and define your ultimate goals
• Prepare your websites, blogs, profiles and personas into a single document to ensure rapidity of data entry to networking profiles.
• Review your email contact lists or open up a 'new' gmail account specifically for your professional networking - many sites offer to import or review your contact list to send out invitations as part of the sign up steps - and if you forget to 'uncheck' the long list of contact names, you will end up sending out 500 invitations including 453 inappropriate invites to family members, 'help-desks', florists, hotels and the vicar 
• Bookmark your profile pages and login pages in a single toolbar folder or home page - I use Zeadoo.com as my homepage and have a professional profile bookmarking section to quickly access my sites to review invitations or conversations 2-3 times a week.
• Have fun

There is no moral obloquy to being associated with social networking sites - in fact this pullulating megalopolis in a pixelated world provides surprisingly sophisticated colloquy.

Naymz.com Professional style networking with minimal scope for social interaction. Simple Invitation system and meta-tag structure allowing easy review of people in your profession. I really like Naymz as a profile holding bay and web presence gallery - and find it simple and easy to use.

• Personal Profile Completion Time - 45 minutes
• Features: RepScore - World Map of Visitors to your profile (with IPs) - Reputation monitor - Great way to add RSS feeds from blogs - high Google presence
• Maintenance: Login three time per week to check messages, review invitations and update website feeds
• Spam Count: Low. Efficient and simple clearing system
• Solicitations: Infrequent and easy to clear
• Tips/Tricks: Maintain a RepScore 10 to take advantage of the visitor tracking and reputation monitor. Complete profile in full, ensure new web profiles are updated regularly and add RSS feeds for your blogs. You only get 10 referees to display - so make sure they have the highest repscore (10) in order to increase your profile points. Once signed in - immediately alter the email settings so you only get notifications once a week!

 LinkedIn.com The ultimate Professional Networking system. Many professional networkers use this site to gather 10-20,000 contacts! I use it as a secure way of maintaining a select band of trusted contacts and to maintain a 'CV' like professional profile - which I use in my email signature.

• Personal Profile Completion Time - 45 minutes
• Features: Comprehensive and professional layout. Respected professional network site. Q&A section with rapid fire answers from respected professionals. Groups functions.
• Maintenance: Login 1-2 times per week to check inbox, review invitations and update website feeds
• Spam Count: Low. Efficient and simple clearing system
• Solicitations: Infrequent and easy to clear
• Tips/Tricks: Try to maintain contacts as trusted networking contacts 

 Ecademy.com Huge network in the UK and Europe, in fact one of the biggest online networking sites in the world. Initially I found this site to lack intuition, have inadequate explanation and basically be a bit of a nuisance. I stopped attending the site and only partially completed my profile. Then after 3 months absence I got an invite from a trusted colleague and gave it another shot with great success. Have now made lots of great contacts in Australia and throughout the world. Use this to get help and advice for the HealthEngine website, get some support and to create a viral medium.

• Personal Profile Completion Time - 60 minutes
• Features: Great profile page editing function (able to put company logo and website hyperlinks), internet feeds, website and blog feeds (appear in NetNews) Comprehensive and professional layout. Respected professional network site. Well maintained blogs by business professionals on the site to review. Groups functions.
• Maintenance: Login 3 times per week to check messages, review invitations, reply to messages.
• Spam Count: Moderate. Not complicated to clear - but can be a little oppressive at times
• Solicitations: Frequent and can become oppressive
• Tips/Tricks: Listen to Thomas Power (founder) and his interview with Stan Relihan. Remember that if somebody sends you a message and you reply - then you are 'linked'
• Black star members pay a lot for the privilege and generally have a product to sell - Power Networker status (orange stars) can be attained by inviting 10 people and gives some improved messaging services. 

rss-in-the-classroom03

socialbookmarking

Image via Wikipedia

We are "borrowing" an idea from NECC for the first time this year as well.  We call it (with apologies) Blogger's Corner.  The concept is for a comfortable, informal place for people to get together and network, brainstorm and learn.  During the two days of the conference we will also offer some "mini" session (about a half hour long) on things that don't get touched in the conference or are just not big enough to warrant a full hour session.  We hope that the extra opportunity to learn and the relaxed environment will encourage people to come.  I guess we will find out!  The first one is at 11am today.  I don't expect more than a person or two, but it's a first time thing so hopefully it will go.

I'm sitting in my presentation room now waiting for my first session of the day.  I'm presenting on our new tool for online classes called Adobe Connect.  It's a great tool but it is replacing a tool everyone is used to so there is bound to be a little resistance.  Hopefully this presentation will grease the wheels a bit.  After this one is over I am all about Web 2.0 for the rest of the conference.  Intro to Web 2.0, Twitter, Social Bookmarking and RSS are the rest of my sessions.  After the dust clears I am going to try to post all of my presentations (and hopefully those of my counterparts) on a Wikispaces site.  I will give it to you when I set it up.  If I forget, feel free to remind me!

A book mark saving and sharing web service started in 11/03 by Joshua Schachter, acquired by Yahoo in 12/05.

Delicious lets you store your bookmarks online, so you can access them from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. You use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also see the links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return.

You can even browse and search Delicious to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved – which is made easy with tags.

This reminded me of an unconventional use of tagging that I've started at our Adolescent Parent Centre School in their . I'm working with students who want to earn a volunteer credit to inventory all the books in their classrooms and mini-library in librarything and tagging them by the location so that they can be easily located within the school. As of today 803 items are added. (I wanted to put the widget here but unfortunately Wordpress does not accept java script - Librarything is working on a compatable widget so please click the image above or here to visit the Adolescent Parent Centre librarything.) One thing I learned is that in order to sort them by location, the location had to be the first tag listed, and that it had to be added consistently - e.g. rm 18 OR rm18, but not some of each. Searchable fields include author, title and subjects that are often imported in via the ISBN # so I didn't think it was that important to add other tags - but may decide to go back and have students add them in later. I really like the book suggester and the book unsuggester for the APC students and am anxious to have them use librarything in a lab setting to see whether they enjoy exploring librarything including looking at other's tags others' libraries.

In her blog post "All Together Now" Donna DesRoches describes how useful social bookmarking can be for classes of students researching similar topics. For instance one class researching endangered species tagged their best websites as "species at risk" so everyone else in the class could easily find others' bookmarks. I believe Donna when she states students are more careful to critically evaluate websites if they know others are going to look at them.

What Donna has done in her school division that impresses me the most is "written social bookmarking into our ninth-grade information literacy skills continuum". I agree this is a research tool that all senior students should have in their virtual toolkit.

Check out my Diigo here or click on the Diigo Widget in the left sidebar of this blog. The first thing I noticed is that the widget automatically included a RSS feed button and some of my more frequent tags which is much more visually attractive.

Once logged into Diigo I was able to import all my bookmarks from Delicious. I was also able to install their toolbar for my browser easily. Diigo allows you to filter your bookmarks by your tags just as easily as Delicious, but one advantage is that it allows you to create lists based on tag searches. So I created a list of my bookmarks that I would share with just the English Team at my school.

The tools I appreciate the most  are the highlighting and sticky note tools. You can highlight text on a webpage and add a sticky note if you want that will persist in your bookmarks.

I like the slide show Diigo will create for those that want to have a visual scan of theirs or others' bookmarks.

I also like the way Diigo will allow users to make actual bookmarks private, allowing one to keep private/personal and professional bookmarks in one account.

I can explore others bookmarks based on their tags just as easily as in Delicious. I'm still shy for a social bookmarker, and haven't added any friends or groups yet. I think the best time to do this would be for a real collaborative purpose like lesson, unit or curriculum planning, but if for any reason someone else invites me as a friend, I'll probably jump on the chance to experience how it works.

Now getting back to the original question; Delicious or Diigo? Sorry if it appears to be a cop-out, but I can't make up my mind yet and I'm going to stick with both for awhile.

The Social Part of Social Bookmarking

I always noticed how many others had also bookmarked the same URLs, and I always took this as a sign of the sites' reliability. It never once dawned on me to actually click on that number to see who else had bookmarked it. When I did I realized I could look at their bookmarks. There was one member named bookwyrmish whose bookmarks I looked at and for a minute I thought I was back at my own bookmarks. The entries were so freakishly alike that I got a chill. The next day I checked out bookwyrmish's links again and he/she had added a whole bunch more that weren't at all like mine but included many that I was interested in - so I decided we simply had similar interests and subscribed to his/her delicious bookmarks through my RSS feeds. I learned I could add this person to my network of people, but decided to stick with the RSS for now. I think it would be good to use the network feature when I'm working with a group of teachers collaborating on unit development or a lesson plan.

I used to think that you had to create a separate account in order to share some of my bookmarks with teaching teams at work. For example, I created a whole separate Delicious account to share some rubric and assessment tools with the English teachers last year. I just discovered that I could have just searched for those sites with a tag which creates a subset of my bookmarks, then shared that URL. For example here is the list when I search my bookmarks for those bookmarks tagged with web2.0 http://delicious.com/mikisew/web2.0.  I can even narrow down further what I want to share with others by adding another tag to the search string - For instance if I added web2.0 and video tags : http://delicious.com/mikisew/web2.0+video .

I'm still not using Delicious to its fullest potential, but I'm more likely to now when the need arises.

http://www.kledy.de/buttons.php

Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via Flickr

Web 2.0 Self-Education Project:  Shamanic Shift Center created accounts at Swurl, Profilactic, FriendFeed, and MyBlogLog.  I am testing the Lifestreams to determine which - if any - is the most reliable way to integrate most if not all of the many blogging, status, linking, and other streams we started around the web.

MyBlogLog (owned by Yahoo!) has been working well for the longest but the links there are ephemeral. The list flushes clean every day or so. MyBlogLog publishes as RSS and provides a feed widget for embedding into a blog or profile page.  BlogCatalog's activity feed is similar but it appears at this writing that the links there are lasting a bit longer, reaching back a few weeks.

Swurl integrates the fewest services into a Lifestream but allows the most customizing of the apprearance and offers both blog and timeline formats (illustated above). Since Shamanic Shift Center's web accounts happen to match Swurl's covered source feeds it seemed best - until ShamanicShift's Swurl broke on 9/28. First the StumbleUpon links stopped appearing, then the site could not be accessed, then attempts to delete and re-add StumbleUpon or other sources (to try and fix the problems) started resulting in an 'Unable to delete source - Try again later' message, and since then our Swurl only shows entries back to 9/28/2008 and states 'No more entries' even though it used to go back to 2002. Maybe Shamanic Shift's Swurl is the only one broken because I found others that appear to be working OK. So Swurl is no longer the favorite.

Profilactic integrates the most services and allows adding others by URL.  But it fails to load the lifestream on about half of my attempts and always runs into problems with (then skips over) one or two of the source feeds.  There is a useful sidebar with the URLs of 'Where to find me' on the web.  To make Profilactic portable there is an RSS feed, a badge for blogs and websites, and a Profilactic WordPress plugin.  If you're a Ping.fm user, you can post content from within Profilactic directly to Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, Blogger and more. 

FriendFeed currently covers 43 services and has been working well consitantly updating the lifestream.  Friends from Facebook can be kept in sync and there is a help page of how-tos.  I have been unable to use the posting feature for messages, links, and photos except in Internet Explorer 7.  The same is true for the button to join any of the FriendFeed discussion 'Rooms' - the little bubble just keeps twirling around and around.  Five customizable widgets are available at FriendFeed.  And FriendFeed is still displaying links for us back to March 2007. Update 10/4: Updating Adobe Flash fixed the posting problems so now FriendFeed is the favorite.

Shamanic Shift Center and Companions Circle have been using customizable RSS feed-digests by Feed.Informer for years.  Apparently there have been big changes at Feed.Informer - which used to be called FeedDigest - and it concerns me just a bit that there is currently no way for us to keep paying Feed.Informer for our upgraded account.  The payment system is being revamped too, reads the notice on the upgrade account page and assures us our feed digests will be unaffected for at least a month - while our payment is now a month and a half overdue.  I don't want to see our Feed Digests disappear! 

This isn't the end of the testing period for Lifestreaming services - just the beginning.  It remains to be seen what kind of ads start supporting each of them.  Ads are OK with me if they stay simple - if not subtle - and do not cause browser troubles or worse. All of these Lifestreaming services encourage networking - through integrating friends from source streams or following favorites or joining/starting groups or a combination.

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The main development this week on the St.Helens Council website is the adding of social networking and bookmarking options.

From the front page, there's an "Interact with Us" section including more obvious links to our Facebook group and our Twitter feed.

We've also added bookmarking options to every page on the site. So please help us make an impact on the Digg and Delicious rankings by bookmarking us. (We may not knock the US Elections or iPhone news off the front pages for a while, but it's a start!)

So, please check out the site, even if to just join us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.

Please start giving us your feedback also. What do you think of the changes we've made so far? What else should we consider? How do you find the bookmarking links to use? Please let us know by commenting on this blog.

Thanks a lot.

Dippity is about letting users follow updates from the people and topics they care about, and have fun doing it. (BK Gupta)

So what is Dipity - and what can you do with it? Dipity is a social feed aggregator; web and topic searching tool; topic/news updating service....and much more. Dipity allows the user to

• Follow friends and friends feeds (start by importing your twitter contacts)
• Search the web (Dipity will search the web for the most popular content - and keep you posted on new developments concerning the topic)
• Follow RSS feeds (drop your favorite RSS feed into your lifestream)
• Create and share your very own Dipity Channel

Dipity organizes updates from sites like YouTube, WordPress and Twitter as well as 7500 news sites into “channels” on an interactive timeline. Users create 'personal channels' (lifestreams) from popular social sites like Twitter, Pandora, or Flickr to broadcast updates to their friends, and can start a channel about anything from Aalborg to zygapophysis in just a few seconds.

Social interactivity has been transformed with the re-design. Simply sync your Twitter friends as Dipity friends to immediately start following feeds. Share the Dipity channel well as being able to follow friends, your dipity search channel has been made very easy to share. Twitter messaging is soon to be intergrated to enhance the medium of micro-blogging to the site.

View your followed topics and friends on a sliding timeline; as a Flipbook; in list format or on a world map - in full screen, browser view or as a widget.

Great stuff from the Dipity crew - enjoying my early interactions with the user interface and looking forward to twittering from the home page and really getting to grips with the enhanced features.

Early days in the review of this site - but I love it. Great interactivity, rapid and responsive timeline with great graphics and visual markers. The enhanced interface holds the user on course to explore their chosen topic, only to drift through pixelated threads to wash up on some far distant surfing shore…

Read more on the blog...

Picture from Flickr Creative Commons

“Fast, stripped down and eminently usable…” Mmm…wait….what were you thinking?  The same as my students when I ask them to go to my Delicious site?  I swear every time I ask my students to do this, at least one or two of the boys gives me a funny look like they think I’m into something weird.  But when you get right down to it, this quote from Fred Stutzman (In Stephens, p. 3), a doctoral student and blogging expert on social tools, pretty much sums up my feelings about what a great social bookmarking tool like Delicious really is.  It’s quick and easy to set up, account holders can begin tagging and sharing sites instantly with nary a thought and then find their favourite sites with the click of a mouse.

Have you caught the social bookmarking bug yet?  Personally, I can’t imagine anyone who owns or has access to a computer not having at least one social bookmarking site.  In my opinion, having a social bookmarking site is a crucial piece in the puzzle to stay organized in an electronic world and it appears from my reading this week that I am certainly not alone.  One of the numerous testaments I’ve read this week about how important social bookmarking sites have become those who live in a digital world was by Patricia Anderson, a librarian at the Health Sciences Library at the University of Michigan.  In the article, “Tags Help Make Libraries Del.icio.us” she is quoted as saying, “I find del.icious has probably been the single most valuable tool for personal and professional productivity that I have encountered in a long time (p. 26).”  Amen to that!

Although “tagging” is not without its critics, particularly those in the library community who feel that it will be difficult to find items in the future because standardized language is not being used to describe online materials, writers such as Mary Ellen Bates believe that an important feature of folksonomies lies in its ability to “enhance exploration” (rather than searching) and helps users to find items of current interest now, when the searcher needs it the most (p. 64).  Besides, writes Bates, does it really matter how someone else tags an item as long as you can find it again?  This, writes Bates, is the real power of tagging since it enables users to manage their own information sources, state why a piece of information is important to them and subsequently “embed that knowledge into the source” for future use (Bates, p. 64). 

I was first introduced to social bookmarking and delicious, in particular, by our divisional library consultant who is the guru of anything Web 2.0.  I first began using delicious two years ago as a way of keeping track of my ever-increasing amount of web sites and online articles that I wanted to use for my own professional development and in the classroom.  It did not take long for my delicious site to become a place where I could not only store and find my favourite sites but also I could share my favourite websites with my fellow staff members, teacher-librarians and students.

Currently, I have over 1,500 sites listed on my delicious account.  If I wasn’t using a social bookmarking system, I simply wouldn’t be able to keep track of that many sites and find them again easily.  I love it that I can tag an item from any computer I’m on that has the delicious buttons downloaded (which is super easy) and I can retrieve these tags from any computer.  I also use the “search” button extensively to find items in my tags and to find sites that others have tagged on similar subjects.  Being able to view the tags in clouds helps me to see patterns in tagging that I might have missed looking at one of several URLs in a list.

I am so sold on the delicious bookmarking system that I convinced my principal to let me teach our entire staff about the benefits of social bookmarking.  I created this PowerPoint presentation social-bookmarking-powerpoint-presentation for my staff in June 2007.  I will be using it again this fall to teach all our grade 9 students how to set up and use their delicious accounts, as well.  Both the staff and students have access to this presentation by going to my library wiki which is attached to our school website so they can refer to it as needed.

Picture from Microsoft Clip Art

Just when I thought that I knew everything there was to know about social bookmarking, I was brought back to reality this week as I read several articles on the topic and took a closer look at the site, as well.  It seems like this teacher-librarian (a.k.a. “me”) hasn’t been using her Delicious site to its fullest advantage.  It appears that I get the “bookmarking” aspect of Delicious much better than I get the “social” aspect. 

I use my Delicious site primarily as an online place to store and retrieve my favourite websites.  From time to time, I have conducted searches and shared my websites with other teachers and students but on the whole, I have not used the sharing potential of Delicious very much.  So I set out this week to change all that.

I began by trying to subscribe to a few tags that I was interested in or I could use in the classroom including Web 2.0, Ancient Egypt and Teacher Librarian and I was astounded at the results.  I got over three million hits for Web 2.0, alone.  Wow!  Who knew??  At first I got a little panicky – were all these websites going to end up on my own tags?  I like the control I have over what I have tagged so I didn’t want to be overwhelmed with so many sites.  Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to realize that I would have to “Save” any of the tags that appeared in my subscription so I breathed a sigh of relief. 

Next, I tried to set up RSS feeds for these sites.  In Blogs, wikis, and podcasts and other powerful web tools for the classroom, Richardson writes about the advantages of setting up RSS feeds for teaching and learning (p. 99).  Richardson is certainly right when he states that setting up feeds is “almost too simple.”  And the feeds are so accessible either from the Favorites Center on the toolbar (did you know there was a feeds button on this tab?  I didn’t until this week) or they can be sent to your email or attached to your website or blog.  I had no idea it was this easy!!!

What a great tool for the classroom – all the latest tagged websites on any topic you’d like whether you’re working on a school project, building up a classroom online resource base or looking for websites for teaching purposes.   Author Michael Stephens writes in “Tags & social bookmarking” that he uses a tag for each of the classes he teaches and then displays a feed of the sites and articles tagged on the class blogs. 

I thought this idea had so much potential for learning that I decided to create a new Delicious site just for our school After creating the site, I emailed all the teachers on my staff to see who would be interested in becoming part of our school's professional learning community using our school's new Delicious site.  I was thrilled that the first person who responded to my request was our principal who wanted to share some professional development articles.   I've since added more names to our network and will hopefully be adding more as I talk one-on-one with my fellow teachers.  I found a good example of how a teacher can use a Delicious site to promote sharing at: http://delicious.com/budtheteacher  Check out “budtheteacher’s” extensive networking file.

It took me awhile to figure out how to send tagged sites to other del.icio.us members but I finally succeeded and it's really very easy once you know how.  I wanted to be able to send some of the tagged sites on my site to the new school site.  I read that you could import your tagged sites from one site to the other but I didn't want or need to send them all so after a bit of frustration, I figured out that I could bring up the site I wanted to send, click on the "People" tab and send it to whomever I wanted.  Once I got the hang of it, I rather enjoyed the process and began adding tags to our school site according to subject.

I think the idea of students contributing to either class delicious sites or their own sites would be a great way for students to become involved in the learning process and make them feel a part of a dynamic learning community.  Richardson talks about this feeling of “working together” toward a common goal in “Taming the beast: Social bookmarking.”  Students, regardless of location or time could be asked to leave comments in the “notes” section to remind them why they chose a particular website and how it might be helpful for themselves, their classmates or their teacher, for that matter. As noted by Bryan Alexander in “Web 2.0: A new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?” teachers could track a student’s progress by the sites they bookmark and the notes they create about the sites (p. 3).

Teachers could use their delicious sites to bookmark only those websites that they would like their students to visit during a particular lesson or assignment much like pathfinders (Rethlefsen, p. 26).  This would cut down the time wasted having students surf the net for their own sites and getting off topic.  Teacher-librarians could also use a delicious site to create their own pathfinders for student and teacher resources.  Check out my Ancient Egypt tags for an example of how a Delicious tag could act as a pathfinder. 

Library delicious sites could be used to tag author and books sites that are relevant to their clientele and use RSS feeds to keep this information up to date.  Tags could also be used to highlight books recommended for a specific age group, class or genre.  These are ideas I will certainly look into in the future.

The benefits of using social bookmarking sites both within and outside the classroom are enormous.  I’d invite you to become a member of my Delicious site and I’ll become a member of your site.  Then we can start the process of sharing our best sites for educational and professional development purposes.

References

Alexander, B. (2006). Web 2.0: a new wave of innovation for teaching and learning?  Retrieved Oct. 2, 2008, from http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ERM0621.pdf

Anderson, P. In M.L. Rethlefsen. (Sept. 2007). Tags help make libraries del.icio.us. Library Journal, 132(15), 26.  Retrieved Sept. 30, 2008, from the Proquest Database.

Bates, J.E. (Jan./Feb. 2006). Tag-You’re it! Online, 30(1), 64.  Retrieved Sept. 30, 2008, from the Proquest Database.

Richarson, W. (2006). Blogs, wikis, podcasts, and other powerful web tools for classrooms.  California: Corwin Press.

Richardson, W. (2007). Taming the beast: Social Bookmarking. School Library Journal, 3(1). Retrieved Oct. 2, 2008, from http://www.trailfire.com/joannedegroot/marks/199339

Stutzman, F. In M. Stephens. (Sept./Oct. 2007). Tagging & social bookmarking. Library Technology Reports, 43(5), 58. Retrieved Sept. 30, 2008, from the Proquest Database.