Evolutionary Trends of Social Bookmarking Tools

For the past couple years I’ve repeatedly told everyone who would listen that a social bookmarking is one of the “ah-ha” and “you must have one” tools for academics. I started out swearing by Furl because it cached pages. I still like this element when I’m working with writing students working on research projects. However, Furl is a lot less usable than del.icio.us. I’ve since become a devout user, and assigner to my students, of del.icio.us and still happily add to it daily; currently 1340 bookmarks.
I have realized though that there are emerging elements to bookmarking that are extremely useful like the web page annotation feature of Clipmarks and the social ranking of Digg. And it’s just plain cool that there is now an image bookmarking site, FFFOUND! Of course you can track my fascination with bookmarking tools via my bookmarking tool. I think that these criteria for evaluating bookmarking tools also help demonstrate the evoluation of the newer ones.
Although I was happy to switch from Furl to del.icio.us in my writing course, I’ve been seeking for something that will help students recognize that one of the benefits of these tools is folksonomic tagging and making connections to other resources via the tagging. I was excited to see this Webware blog about Diigo adding a social networking element to their bookmarking service. Although it is possible to make “social” connections (follow resource and tags) in del.icio.us, it will be interesting to see if Diigo emphasizes these connections in such a way that my students will more easily “see” them. 

October 11 2007 | Posted in