Week 4: Social Bookmarking

I have been using del.icio.us for many months and I think that it is very useful. I use three different computers so it is very useful to me to have all my bookmarks on one website. I like the feature of adding tags to my bookmarks instead of organizing bookmarks into folders which can be confusing and can waste time thinking about which folder I should use.

I decided to use del.ici.ous rather than other social bookmarking sites because it is very well known and very popular. I see a great potential to use del.icio.us as a research tool for myself and to share with my co-workers or co-presenters on a presentation. I really like the “Your Network” feature where I can easily send URL’s to a specific person.

I also like to see what other people are bookmarking. I browse the “hotlist –what's hot right now on del.icio.us” to see if there are any websites that catch my interest.

I also appreciate that in del.ici.us you can mark some bookmarks as private and “not shared.” This is useful to keep some sites private such as my Netflix queue and my gmail Inbox.

One problem with social bookmarking sites is that the servers might not always be available. This morning when I got to work and tried to open my del.icio.us website, it would not load. I was without my bookmarks and I did not have a backup so I felt completely lost. After del.icio.us came back up, I exported my list from del.iciou.us to my Firebox browser as a Backup.

I also like to use Stumble Upon (http://www.stumbleupon.com/ ). There are so many websites on the Internet- how will I ever find the good ones? I signed up for Stumble Upon and picked the categories of websites that I am interested in seeing. Then, I can rate the websites easily with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.