Web feats 1: Social bookmarking

There are many social web tools that I have adopted into my every day practice. It might sound a little daft for me to claim that I couldn't do without them. I suppose that without them, I would still be able to teach, research and otherwise just about function, but I might also go stark raving mad too if I couldn't use them to make my life a lot easier. Over the next few days I want to list my top social web tools (my Web feats) - the ones I probably couldn't do without... Here's the first in the series: Social Bookmarking.

I first began to use Delicious about two years ago when I stumbled upon it while digging around for some way to store and organise my best internet 'finds'. There are a number of other social bookmarking services available including Diigo, Connotea (academic users), and Citeulike (for referencing) and recommender sites wuch as Stumbledupon, Reddit and Digg. Not everyone likes it, but Delicious is my favourite bookmarking tool because not only does it store away all of my favourite websites (it asks for the URL, a title and some key words), it also has a neat social dimension to it - and it's a lot less messy on the screen than most of the others too. When you save a bookmark on Delicious, it is likely that someone else (and sometimes if it's a very popular website - many other people) has also done the same. A number in a coloured square appears on the right of the bookmark showing you exactly how many other people have saved the URL you have just bookmarked. Click on the number square and you will see all the other people listed in chronological order. Click onto any single user and you will see all of the other websites they have saved. You can choose to visit these websites, bookmark them, tag them and even connect with the other user. I find this an incredibly useful function - it allows me to connect into a ready made community of interest to find people who are interested in the same stuff as me. When you find someone you would like to connect to, you can add them to your Network using the apropriate linked function, found on the top right of the screen.

Delicious also allows me to see who has bookmarked my own blog posts too, as shown in this example. So Delicious can be a very useful tool not only for organising and storing links to your favourite websites, but it's also a very useful way of connecting with people who have similar interests to you.

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