social-bookmarking-II


  1. Exercises to try
    1. NOVICE
    2. APPRENTICE
    3. PRACTITIONER
    4. EXPERT 
  2. Definitions
  3. Further reading/exploration

 
 

 

Aim of the week:  

 

To use social bookmarking efficiently and effectively

 

Exercises to try

 

NOVICE

 

  1. Have you downloaded and installed the Delicious browser buttons on your computer?   They look like this if you are using Mozilla Firefox:

    The buttons make it much easier to bookmarks sites.  Whenever you are on a site you want to bookmark, you simply click the Tag button, and whenever you want to see all your bookmarks, you simply click the Delicious button.  (Click here to download the buttons, if you haven't done so already.)

     

  2.  Have you started to create a Delicious network, i.e., watching people who are also saving bookmarks on Delicious?  See this list of at least 21 people in our Connecting East experiment who you could add to your network.  The little flags show you when the network is mutual (e.g., Karlibaba is in my network AND I am in his, while vanderheijden is in my network, but I'm not yet in hers).

    Add both klandmiles and TheLibrarianEdge to your network PLUS one other person in our group.   For help in doing this, see:

     

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/10960053/How-to-Add-Someone-to-Your-Network?from_email_04_friend_send=1

    How to Add Someone to Your Network via kwout

     

APPRENTICE

 

  1. Complete all Novice tasks above

     

  2. Have a look at your tags as a tag cloud.  (For help with tags, see the Delicious FAQ page on Tags.)

     

  3.  

  4. Go through your bookmarks and add/improve some of your tags.  

     

  5. Send a website you have tagged to someone in your network AND to us, using for:klandmiles and for:thelibrarianedge.  For help in doing this, see:

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/10960252/How-to-Send-Bookmarks-to-Other-Users

    How to Send Bookmarks to Other Users via kwout

PRACTITIONER

 

  1. Complete all Apprentice tasks above.

     

  2. Practice doing some advanced searching on Delicious.  For suggestions of what to try, read below from the Delicious FAQ on searching.

 

  1. What's new in search?

    Our enhanced search feature now lets you search the context of the page you're on. What does this mean? Quite simply, if you're looking at a specific user's bookmarks, you can search their bookmarks. If you're looking at a specific tag, you can search only items with that tag. We also let you search tag intersections as well as user + tag. Select "These Bookmarks" from the search box dropdown and experiment, it's much easier to do than to explain!

    The other new feature is the ability to search your network's bookmarks, just as easily as you'd search your own. So if you're trying to find a bookmark from someone in your network, pick "My Network's Bookmarks" from the dropdown and search away.

     

    What advanced search options can I use?

    Enter some words, and you'll get back links that contain all of them: bacon lettuce tomato finds BLTs.

    The search engine goes through bookmark descriptions, notes, and tags. Tags can be searched exclusively, though, by prefixing the word with "tag:" like so: tag:bacon.

    The purists out there might want to search for BLTs specifically. They're welcome to look for "bacon lettuce and tomato" as a phrase. Note the quotes.

    Maybe you can take or leave bacon. Maybe you also like tofu sandwiches. You're the kind of person who'll love the OR operator and parentheses: (bacon OR tofu) lettuce tomato gets you BLTs or the tofu, lettuce and tomato variety.

    Vegans can use the - (minus) prefix to exclude meat products: lettuce tomato -bacon -ham gets you salads.

    The search engine also supports AND, which is almost never needed because it's the default.

      

EXPERT 

 

  1. Complete all of the Practitioner tasks above.

     

  2. Play the Guess-the-Google Game.  The game reverses the process of tagging by getting you to guess which original keywords or tags were put on the mosaic of 20 images shown. 

 

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Definitions

 

Tags are basically just keywords -- and are extremely important in social bookmarking (and for many other social applications on the web).

 

Here is how Delicious explains them on their website:

 

Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on Delicious to help you organize and remember them. Tags are a little bit like keywords, but you choose them yourself... You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and you can always rename or delete the tags later.

  

For example, if you save an article about how to make a certain kind of cake, you can tag it with recipes sweets yogurt or whatever other tags you might use to find it again. You make up tags as you need them, and use the tags that make the most sense to you.

 

This is great for organizing and finding personal data, but it goes even further when someone else posts related content using the same tags. For instance, to view everybody's bookmarks about sweets, visit delicious.com/tag/sweets. To see the most popular items tagged as sweets, visit delicious.com/popular/sweets. 

 

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Further reading/exploration

 

 

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