Assigment 7: social bookmarking

Translated by Ilaria Montagni

This is my last assignment for the students of the different courses of the Faculty of Medicine, but not for the students of "Toerie della Comunicazione". Obviously if some Medicine students want to express their opinions on this assignment, they are welcomed and I will take account of this.

I suggest using delicious, which the most known social bookmarking systems. It' s a service which allows everybody to store one's bookmarks on the net.

Very briefly, these are the principal advantages.

• Your bookmarks are accessible from any Internet access and not from only one computer; so you can trace them even from a friend's computer, an internet point, a smartphone etc.
• When you store a bookmark you can (or rather you should) associate to them some tags which are like labels, i. e. single words aimed at connoting the bookmark. In order to have an example, you can see my bookmarks.
• The bookmarks are visible to everybody, for example you have just seen mine. If you want, you can make them private, but this means making the process less interesting.
• When you want to search a specific type of bookmark, you use the tags, so a precise choice of the tags is fundamental in order to find what you want. When you make a research, delicious doesn't show only your bookmarks (marked by the tags you've used for the research) but also the bookmarks of the other users who have used the same tags. This is the social aspect: you can find people or communities in the rest of the world who share your interests. Moreover, from the number of people who have stored a bookmark, you can understand its attractive power: a good way for discovering important web-sites you can be interested in.

If you want to learn more, you can go and see the two wiki pages written by some students (last year): the first one is a guide to create the account and the second page is a collection of texts translated into Italian from the Help Page on delicious. In passing, those who want can share their opinions in these pages, introduce some news, corrections or integrations.

Delicious is a very good example for the use of tags. It's very important to understand how tags function because these are a fundamental element of a lot of social networking environments. The classification through tags and not by hierarchic structures is almost the essence of social networking: aggregation through connection.

For this assignment, you have to create an account on delicious, insert your bookmarks, use it for your researches, explore the possibilities by reading the help page and then write a post with your impression and the link to your new delicious account so that others can pry into them.