Social Bookmarking

Using del.icio.us has been very interesting. There are many advantages to a Web based bookmarking tool:

• Portability. The bookmarks can be accessed from any computer.
• Personalization. They can be tagged with terms that are most useful to the user.

I can create collections of bookmarks for specific courses and tag them both by course and by topic. In addition, I can make them available to others. Faculty and students could then have access to a quality collection of Web resources. Having the "tag" function in the browser toolbar makes the process as easy as possible.

Developing a personal system of tags would take some thought but would also assure consistency. I was reminded of the library philosopher, Ranganathan's Colon Classification System as I found myself thinking about the "facets" of a specific resource and assigning multiple tags, each representing a specific facet or aspect, of a source. The "old school" library scheme can help guide the implementation of the "new school" Web 2.0 tool.