The document discusses some of the key benefits of using social bookmarking tools like Delicious over traditional browser-based bookmarking. Social bookmarking allows users to access their bookmarks from any computer by storing them online. It also provides better organization of bookmarks through tagging and filtering capabilities. Bookmarks can easily be shared with others through the social bookmarking platform as well.

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4. One of the biggest problems with saving bookmarks for web sites/pages that are
useful to you is that they end up being shackled to that par=cular computer. Imagine,
for example, that you are doing some research at home that turns up some valuable
informa=on. As you need to jet off to work you decide that you will finish off looking
at what you collected and will embed it into your assignment during your lunch
break. The trouble is that you failed to email the bookmarks to yourself and therefore
can’t do anything. When you get home you find that your computer wont start up so
you need to restore it. Although you backed up all your important files and
documents, this didn’t automa=cally include your browser bookmarks, unless you
were expor=ng them out of your browser as part of your backup procedure.
The above was a really worst case scenario but imagine how inconvenient it is to rely
on bookmarks (which become important when you’re doing research) which are =ed
to one machine. When you are at Kingston, you can’t access the bookmarks you
made at home or work, when you are at work you can’t access the ones at home etc.
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5. Social bookmarking tools such as ‘delicious’ are web based and provide a web
interface so you can work with your bookmarks wherever you want. You can manage
your bookmarks directly from your browser or via the web. We can now see that one
of the many benefits of using a social bookmarking system is that it allows
centralisa=on and ease of access to those important bookmarks.
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7. I’m not sure about you but I’m a bit of a hoarder. I like to hoard informa=on as for me
it is all useful and all worth its weight in gold (even if I never end up looking at it
again). The only problem is that the really useful bits of informa=on become buried
within all of those bookmarks and suddenly all those bookmarks I collected make the
hunt harder. Generally when it comes to browser based bookmarking there is no
really handy mechanism for sor=ng and filtering your bookmarks quickly and
efficiently.
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8. Social bookmarking tools allow you to organise and find your bookmarks in ways that
would be cumbersome or impossible in a browser based bookmarking system. With
delicious you can add a =tle and descrip=on to a bookmark. You can add your own
tags (labels) to your bookmarks to categorise them and delicious even suggests
commonly used tags for that par=cular bookmark.
Once you’ve created a bookmark in delicious you are given a wide variety of op=ons
for sor=ng through and finding those bookmarks. The main method for doing this is
via the tags that you assigned to your bookmarks. As you select tags to filter your
bookmarks you will see bookmarks that contain the chosen tag. As you would
normally associate a number of tags with a par=cular bookmark you would then
con=nue filtering the results as required un=l you get to what you need.
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10. Have you ever needed to share your bookmarks with colleagues, friends etc? Has this
normally involved the painful process of going to your browser, finding the b***dy
thing, opening the page, copying the address, opening your email applica=on...?
Delicious and other social bookmarking tools provide you with a variety of ways to
share your bookmarks in a painless way. You can send a bookmark as an email
message with the minimum of fuss. You can also share bookmarks with specific users
on delicious and also send bookmarks as tweets from twier. The simplest way,
however is to leave bookmarks that you would generally share as public i.e. don’t
mark them as private. All you then need to do is provide your delicious username to a
friend/colleague and they just need to visit you by going to www.delicious.com/
username to get a list of all your bookmarks which they can si] through via the tags
you assigned to your bookmarks.
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11. It’s called ‘social bookmarking’ for a reason, and that means that users bookmarks are
generally le] as public for other users to discover and share. You can search public
bookmarks of other users via the search facility. See what a search of ‘summary care
record’ turned up? I bet you’re interested in all this malarkey now eh? Keep in mind
that some relevant bookmarks may not have turned up in the results because they
may have been tagged as ‘pa=ent care record’ or ‘nhs pa=ent record’ etc. so don’t
limit yourself to just one or two searches. Try to think of all the possible relevant
keywords that might be appropriate to tag a piece of informa=on and then work with
that list.
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