Exploring social bookmarking

Yesterday lunchtime I presented on “Exploring social bookmarking” as part of the Enhancing Teaching Through Technology Summer Seminar Series at the University of Bath. A range of staff attended the session including colleagues from the Library, Careers service and a number of departments.

Unfortunately audio equipment for recording the seminar was not set up in time, but the presentation is available on Slideshare.

Some of the screenprints used are not very clear on Slideshare but feel free to download the original. On a related note unfortunately some of the screenprints did not appear clearly on the projected screen (for example those of the Diigo interface) during the session so this is something to check next time.

During the course of the session a number of interesting questions were raised and there was some preliminary discussion about how participants thought they might be able to use social bookmarking tools. Ideas included for personal research, creation of annotated resource lists by distance learning students, and integration of tag RSS feeds and clouds into Moodle courses.

Questions included management of bookmarks. Can you have categories / sub-categories to organise links? (One participant explained that he was used to having his bookmarks (in a browser) ordered in a hierarchical structure , and that the lack of categories in some social bookmarking tools was a barrier for him. ) Diigo allows categorisation. In Diigo categories are called Lists, and these can be subdivided into Sections. Whilst links cannot be saved directly into a section, they can easily be moved into the correct section afterwards using drag and drop. This in effect gives sub-categories. In del.icio.us tags can be bundled into groups but there is currently no other categorisation.

During a discussion after the session about maintenance of bookmarks the question arose if there was any functionality for mass deletion of bookmarks e.g. by date , so for example you could cull all bookmarks not visited since a certain date. I have not yet come across this function but it is certainly something to investigate further.

There was concern from one participant about liability of students or staff making comments or judgements using annotation functionality e.g. sticky notes in Diigo. Diigo sticky notes can be public, private or group, so comments could be to a restricted audience. Details on prohibited content is available in the Diigo Terms of use.

There was an interesting question regarding business models of social bookmarking tools. Diigo does have advertising. As far as del.icio.us is concerned the answer may well lie in the integration of social bookmarking into web searching (“Social searching”).

There was interest in generation and potential uses of tag clouds, and a question about the amount of control you have over how tag clouds are displayed. In del.icio.us for example you can organise your tag cloud to display alphabetically or by frequency. In Diigo you can sort your tags by “Your usage” or “Community usage”.

In terms of my personal reflections on how the seminar went, overall I enjoyed it and participants seemed engaged with the topic. Although we discussed briefly potential uses of social bookmarking, I felt that there was more scope to develop this discussion if more time had been available. Due to the nature of the subject an element of hands-on might also be appropriate, and this is something to consider for a potential future session. I am also currently developing an online learning package which looks at social bookmarking, and this could be possibly used in conjunction with a face-to-face or online discussion.

Lastly, during the session I mostly focussed on Diigo as it is the most powerful tool of this kind I have come across. We did cover a small number of other tools including del.icio.us, Furl, Connotea and Cite-U-Like. Obviously there is variation in functionality between these and other tools. There was some discussion around areas such as import/export options and caching. I have been preparing a comparison of these 5 in terms of common functions. Unfortunately it was not quite finished in time for yesterday, but this would clearly be a useful resource to have available to support this type of session and would help participants to identify the tool which most closely meets their requirements. I will make it available as soon as possible.