About Social Bookmarking

Check out the social bookmarks for the conference. Also see the bookmarks listed on the lower right side of the blog.

What is a social bookmark?
Social bookmarks are publicly sharable URL bookmarks or favorites. What's so great about that?

At a basic level, they are convenient. If you save your bookmarks on a server instead of your browser you can access them anywhere. But that's just scratching the surface. And it is not social.

The power of social bookmarks comes in the sharing and filtering of bookmarks. First the sharing:

Say you are a maven in some area of practice or interest. You rapidly find and consume knowledge online and you have a keen sense for quality resources. How can you easily share this expertise with your colleagues or students? If you create a social bookmark account at del.icio.us, Furl, Blinklist or similar site, you can share your links with others by giving them the URL and/or integrating a list of links into your web page or blog. Social bookmarking sites provide you with cut and paste code to make it easy. You can also subscribe to other's bookmarks through RSS newsreaders.

You can also filter and manage knowledge by tagging your bookmarks or by searching for bookmarks with particular tags. Tags are a form of metadata, a word or short phrase that describes the content of a link. You choose how to tag your links. (This is called folksonomy as opposed to taxonomy. See Ulises Ali Mejias thorough exploration.) You can subscribe to and publish bookmarks with selected tags. When we do this, we take advantage of our and others' considered attention. In a world of exploding knowledge production, tagged bookmarks help us refine our search. In fact, we do not have to search, others do it for us.

Still with me? Now here comes the fun part. We have set up an account at Del.icio.us for this conference. To log in, use the username "odcecon" and the password "odcecon06." Check out the help page for adding buttons or bookmarklets to your browser that will allow you to easily bookmark and tag a site. Now, as you come across web sites relevant to our conversations, tag it! Share the wealth!

If you already have a delicious account, you can tag links with the tag "for:ODCECon" and they will be added to the "for" area of the ODCECon account. Anyone who is logged in can transfer the link to the main list.

Go ahead, bookmark it! Help build the required reading list for online learning in Ohio!

Technorati Tags: ODCE