Week 4 - Social Bookmarking

For this week's exercise we were to register with Delicious.com if we hadn't already, as well as two other social bookmarking sites to investigate. Prior to working on this subject, I did not have a Delicious site so I have registered and worked on this to begin with as an introduction to the world of social bookmarking.
From reading about Delicious and watching the video on the web 2.0 page, it is easy to see how social bookmarking can be an advantage in referencing and expanding your knowledge and complements the referencing system a person might have as it can be as detailed or as simple as you need.
When registering for Delicious, I allowed it to simply create tags from my bookmarks, which led to tags being created that have absolutely no relevance to the sites within them so I then had to backtrack and edit these tags so I would have some chance later of being able to find what I need. Perhaps this is one recommendation that I would suggest for anyone in the future that allowing the program to simply create tags for your based on your own bookmarks may not be a preferred option as the computer's ideas of what is relevant may not at all be relevant to an individual (eg Bookmarks_Menu) was one of the tags that the computer created which had some social networking sites as well as news headlines and other websites, nothing of which I would be able to find at a later date with those tags.
At first glance, sites such as Delicious are a bit intimidating as there is so much information on the web, that it is hard to know where to start in developing your own references. My problem was solved once I began exploring other people's Delicious sites to see what and how their reference were listed. Once able to view other people's sites, I was able to get a better idea of the sorts of things that I would need to add to my own site. One of the advantages of Delicious is how easy it is to update your page once the buttons have been added to your browser. Personally, the convenience of this site sets it apart from other information management strategies that we have looked at so far as its practical application is so useful, relevant and easy to update review, that once grasped, would be very useful for future endeavours.
The second part of this weeks' task was to go and investigate a few other social bookmarking sites, so I went straight to Furl, however upon going to this site, I found that the site is being absorbed by Diigo and is being phased out, therefore in order to stay up with current information management systems, I decided to look no further with Furl and to instead investigate Diigo. Upon first inspection, it is clear that this is an up-to-date site as it has capabilities with iPhones and very new technology.
Diigo appears to complement Delicious (certainly as they link up with one another) very well and certainly looks as though it is perhaps a more detailed version of a similar thing. In researching this site, I found that this is able to be set up for a group, in completing work based tasks. This would be a helpful tool in the future for group assignments and future careers as a member a group is able to highlight a section of text and make it available for the rest of a group to view to help with correspondence and group study. Personally, although Diigo provides the user with many more options, I did not find it to be as organised a site as Delicious. This may be my own doing but I did certainly find Delicious easier to use. Perhaps as Delicious does not offer the user the same amount of functions than Diigo is the reason why it was easier to use, however that may just be my own findings though I do believe Diigo to be very useful and complementary to Delicious.
After Diigo, I also had a look at Connotea, with this one, I did not sign up to be a member, though I certainly think that is something that I would look to do in the future as one of its major advantages compared to a program like Endnote is that it is linked to the web and is therefore accessible from any computer, whereas your Endnote library is customised to the computer that it was saved on (or at least the network). Connotea appears to work in a similar way to Endnote in that it stores references for bibliographic use. It differs from Endnote in that a user is able to share their libraries, parts of their libraries or certain references with other users, and vice versa.
I believe that one major advantage for all of the bookmarking sites is the social capabilities in that it works to increase knowledge rather than just store your own. Whilst it is good to have a program that stores your references, from looking at these sites and researching their capabilities, I believe that it is an advantage for future learning and research to be able to look at other people's libraries (with their permission) and be able to view other resources that they have found and perhaps better ways of organising their own references.
Programs like Endnote are making the task of referencing much easier and less labour intensive, as well as helping to make learning a progressive thing rather than starting from scratch for every assessment and task. Social bookmarking sites complement this and enable the user to be able to utilise their references from any computer with internet access, as well as allowing the user to view other people's libraries which shares enables us to share knowledge and ideas.