Exercise 5 – Discovering bookmarking in del.icio.us

This assignment was an exercise in exploring “the value of social bookmarking tools for re-finding items of interest and for discovery.” Since I first set up my del.icio.us account two months ago, I have basically only used it as a dumping ground for the required weekly class bookmarks as well as for links to my classmates’ blogs. This exercise opened my eyes to some quick and simple ways of discovering additional interesting “items of interest”.

The first of these involves looking at the popularity factor of a bookmark, i.e., the more people that bookmark an item, the greater chance it will be a valuable resource. I tend to view bookmarks as recommendations. One thing to note in looking at a recent bookmarked resource is that it may not yet have a large number of bookmarks until more people have had a chance to view it.

A second strategy in discovering interesting, relevant items involves common tagging. When bookmarking I tend to choose suggested tags because it inherently makes sense to do so for future searching. I also want others to be more likely to find my tagged items by using common labels. For example, I use the tag ‘socialbookmarking’ (46,110 bookmarks) over the similar but less used ‘social_bookmarking’ (11,130 bookmarks) due to the popularity of the former. Tagging is fairly new to me and I look forward to using it in del.icio.us as a way of researching topics.

A third strategy for discovery is to review another person’s set of bookmarks. I picked a person at random and found myself scanning his bookmarks overall to get a feel for the kind of items he chooses to bookmark. Upon seeing several interesting looking resources, I felt confident that the one I ultimately chose would be a useful one.

A fourth and final strategy involves looking at bookmarks of colleagues (in this case, my classmates) or those who are interested in similar topics. In doing so I found that my peers had indeed bookmarked some of the same sites as me. I also found other interesting resources due to our shared common interests, by being in the same class as well as library school in general. Scanning for people recognized in the library or social media fields is another idea for viewing bookmarks in order to connect to relevant resources that they deem valuable, somewhat like using references at the end of an article to find further information. With social bookmarking, I can review an authority’s or peer’s bookmarks, make my selections, and save them.

All the strategies I’ve practiced for this exercise have given me new, quick, and simple ways of discovering interesting and relevant information in my future search endeavors.