Most Users Appreciate The Convenience Of Bookmarking


by hebe - Date: 2010-09-12 - Word Count: 552 Share This!

Bookmarks have been available on every browser since the Web began. Whenever you come across an interesting page, instead of jotting down the address, you can simply click on a button to record it; and thereafter, every time you click on the bookmark, you return to your site. Most users appreciate the convenience of bookmarking. But a single individual will only ever find a fraction of the sites that might be of interest. What a benefit it would be if one could see all the bookmarks that had been created by other, like-minded users. This is precisely what Links Of London Bracelets social bookmarking sets out to do. You join a community of users. When you find something interesting, you share it with them; and in return you get to see the bookmarks that they have created. The exact mechanism for doing this varies, and the services offered by the social bookmarking providers are diverse. But the central idea remains the same.

The term 'social bookmarking' was coined by the first service to capture the public imagination, allowed users for the first time to save their bookmarks to a public web page, and instead of organizing them into folders let the user 'tag' their bookmarks with key words for ease of searching. A large number of similar services has since sprung up, notably Redd it (which is especially good for news and breaking stories), Digg (great for technical news), and StumbleUpon. These services have proved extremely popular: if you look at the bottom of any BBC News page, for example, you will see links to many of the major bookmarking sites, so that anyone interested in a particular page can mark it for the attention of his or her friends or the wider community.

The most popular of the social bookmarking sites is probably Stumble Upon. Once you have registered, you download a toolbar and then select the categories (there are several hundred of them) that you are interested in. The new Stumbler' can then click the 'Stumble!'button and get a page from one of these areas that has been selected by other 'Stumblers' with the same interests. If you want, you can just look. If you wish to be more collegial, you can vote on whether you like the page or not by clicking on the 'Thumbs Up' or Thumbs Down' icons, or Links Of London Friendship Bracelets write a review, or get in touch with the person who originally recommended the page, or ... but you get the idea.

What makes SU useful for the teacher, however, is that it is possible to modify one's interests at any time. A few clicks of the mouse will allow you to search for materials in a particular topic area. For the purposes of this column, I cancelled all my normal preferences and replaced them with a single one: linguistics. The first few hits were worthy but unexciting academic sites. But then I came across Visuwords. I have always been a great fan of the Visual Thesaurus, which I have discussed in a previous column, but ever since they started charging for it I have been looking for a substitute. Visuwords is not as colorful, nor as elegant; but it provides a graphical illustration of words, their meanings and relationships, and is simple and fun to use.

Related Tags: preferences, interesting, recommended, bookmarking, particular

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