Saturday, January 17, 2009

Social Bookmarking: Tag. You're It!

It's all about the tagging. Bookmarking is a 'social service' designed to allow the user to access more and more websites while categorizing the information with tags. They are able to get the information anywhere, anytime. Tags are used for photos and websites; the keywords sort and classify the information. The 'how to' video by Chris Betcher not only helped me understand social bookmarking; it makes me realize how important it is to contribute to the web. I downloaded jing and watched my screen come alive. Now that is an incredible tool! I'd like to make a few of those 'how to' videos myself. It would be a great way to give back.
I can see why it's important to tag well. It reminds me of the students who save their work with crazy names and then can never locate the files.
It is no wonder that patterns start to emerge and connections are made between tags (case in point: I signed up for Facebook. Within two days a girl I used to babysit in California in 1974 friended me)! The connectedness of everything is incredible.
The tag clouds make a strong point. It will be interesting to see a tag cloud of Obama's Inaugural address. I'm guessing 'economic' might show up quite a bit. Or how about 'hope?'
So, I have a delicious acct and some bookmarks. It seems as if I'm always looking for something. Hopefully Delicious and tagging will help. And speaking of tagging, I used Wordle this past summer. It was so fun to see the patterns emerge. Tag. You're It.

1 comment:

  1. I love social bookmarking. I use diigo, and belong to many educational groups through it. Once the group updates the bookmark, it is like a RSS feeder! The bookmarks come to me, I do nothing except get lost in looking at them all. I do contribute to the groups as well. I also have my colleague's create accounts so I can add them as a friend to share the sites with. I use them a ton in my lessons for my students and set up lists. One example is for research about internet safety. I find a lot of great sites the kids can use, and wa-la, they are all in one nice neat link. It is helpful to use if your school district doesn't embrace Google searches.

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