Social+Bookmarking

=SOCIAL BOOKMARKING=



Technical Description
Most people who have used internet browsers are familiar with the concept of bookmarking- saving an internet address for future access. Social bookmarking takes that concept and puts it online, and adds a social component to it. Users navigate to a website they want to save, and they use a bookmarklet to save it. A bookmarklet is a little piece of code stored in a bookmark locally on the computer. When clicked, it contacts the social bookmark site and adds the current page's address to the site. As users continue to navigate, they add ever more bookmarks.

The social aspect of social bookmarking is an interesting addition. Users can follow other users' bookmarks. Usually each user has a niche or topic they bookmark. If they like the bookmark, they can add it to their bookmarks. Instead of the old way of sending an email "Hey check out this link", users can just follow each other and get the link pushed to them.

Diigo and Delicious are the two most popular social networking sites. They both have very similar concepts, and who uses which one is a person preferences. However, Diigo seems to be a little more modern in its operation and its look.

Educational Usage
A great use of social bookmarking is for a teacher to have an account with related research links for a project. Students can go there and find a starting point for their research, for a book or a topic. Other teachers can follow that teacher and get ideas for their projects. Another way would be for students working on a project together to each have an account, and add bookmarks to what they are working on. Couple with GoogleDocs as the place for the actual writing, and all the resources they need are online.