Module 5 Activity 1: Refection on the value of social bookmarking’

In the vast expanse of the World Wide Web, bookmarking has proven to be a very useful and efficient feature/practice, especially for very active netizens.  As the internet expands, there are increasing numbers of websites that cater to productivity in various fields of endeavour, provides many resource centres, and cater to inter-connectivity and collaboration between individuals and groups across the globe.  According to Internet Live Stats (http://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/), there are just under one billion websites online today and it is expected that by the end of 2014, the one billion mark will be reached.

With so many websites available, users can be forced to either memorize the URL of the sites that are important to them, use a search engine to locate these sites each time they are needed, or write them down in some form.  The process of bookmarking uses the last method.  Users write down the website's address electronically. Most, if not all, web browsers have a bookmarking feature that many users make use of.  It allows them to save and organize addresses in the bookmarks folder for easy access when needed; with a single click on an item in this list, the browser will load the required website.  This process has a major limitation, it is browser specific!  Therefore, if you use different browsers (for instance Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) on the same computer, each browser will have its own bookmark folder containing only the bookmarks created when that browser was being used.  This results in bookmarked items being scattered between browsers and therefore not always immediately available to the user.

Social bookmarking takes the process of bookmarking to a new level of efficiency.  Instead of being browser specific, bookmarking sites like Diigo allow users to create an account with the site, add a small app to each of their browsers, and then use that app to save their bookmarks to that online site (ie Diigo).  Regardless of the browser used, the app stores the bookmarks in one place.  Users can then organize their bookmarks and access them all from that main site.  These sites also generally allow for group collaboration in the creation and usage of bookmarks, and moreover, allow users to share their bookmarks with others online simply by giving them the URL of the list of bookmarks they want to share.  This means that a large pool of internet resources can be shared, as bookmarked sites, with a single link.  This is tremendously valuable to individuals working in similar fields or who have the same interests and so on.  Interestingly, if bookmark lists are created to be publicly view-able, random users searching the internet can happen upon them and find these useful gems in one place rather than searching through the vast expanses of the WWW.