Home Work time... Social Bookmarking

So we're doing a project in class this week on social bookmarking. I have to say I was very wary going into this project, the idea of sharing your bookmarks (or favorites if you are using IE or whatever you mac people have) scared me. It's not that I don't have anything to hide, but it's the idea that there is no privacy the bothers me. So anxiously as instructed I created a delicious account. To use delicious you have to sign up for yahoo. Be wary I warn you... yahoo likes to install all kinds of extra features and sign you up for every mailer they have ... hey they gotta make money, I understand, I just don't really like Yahoo! that much. So back to social bookmarking. Once I got through the challenges of creating an account I found that during the process it offers to install add-ons for most web browsers including the one I use Firefox. So I installed the add-on. *If you're using firefox and the addon I found it much easier to use when i switched it to the "classic view" (Top of your tool bar, look for the "delicious" button, click then down towards the bottom you'll see the option.) What this does is separate your bookmarks from delicious bookmarks. Which comforted me in knowing I was still able to maintain privacy.

The whole idea behind social bookmarking is that you can 1) access your resources (web links) from anywhere, 2) Tag the marked page making it easier for you to find what your looking for as well as allow you to add notes to the content beyond just the URL, and 3) it connects your publicly marked bookmarks with everyone else using the system. Allowing you to search tags and find what other people are using are resources and then adding it to your collection if it turns out it's useful to you. Beyond the privacy issues I was first concerned with this seems like a great idea. Once I added a few of the pages I had bookmarked on my own for class research, I added them to delicious, gave them some notes and some tags. It exploded from there, I just did a brief search of some commonly used tags and instantly found several resources that are excellent. You can view my bookmarks at: http://delicious.com/billinghamiv