Vast Active Library and Information Science blog. From a recent library science graduate in Wellington, New Zealand. A focus on reference and current awareness tools and issues, especially free, web-based resources.

 
Roxomatic offers a short, interesting list of reasons to use social bookmarking services. It's worth a read if you're currently agnostic about social bookmarking, or need to convince others of the benefits. Several of them stood out for me:

"...[H]ave a really comfortable place to back up your bookmarks, to get them back e.g. after installing a new system, changing your desktop or switching to another browser.

No time to read an obviously interesting article now? No possibility to print it? Add articles with the tag toberead to your database, and read and/ or print them later.

Find quickly the most recommended bookmarks about a topic, e.g. interesting informations about Firefox extensions will be found at del.icio.us/tag/firefox+extensions, and subscribe to it.

Make a copy of interesting newspaper articles – or are you sure your newspaper company will have permalinks and a free archive forever?"

Looking over those, it seems that my main reasons for using social bookmarking tools (I use Furl and del.ic.ious) are non-social - I'm more interested (at the moment) in organising my own information, having it accessible from both my work and home computers, and storing interesting articles in my own archive. No doubt that will change once I've transferred all my bookmarks into del.ic.ious and I can start finding users with similar interests to mine.



| posted by Simon at 8:56 am