I am my bookmarks.

Wow. I can certainly say that from our little experiment, I learned a lot about my classmates. This was a nice way to get to know everyone. It was a little tedious to read through 264 bookmarks, but it was interesting to see the overlaps, and I learned about some cool new sites from my classmates. I think that with a little tweaking, this could be a great virtual introduction for other online classes.

Some suggestions for making this a more viable "virtual introduction":

• maybe take the number of bookmarks down to five per person. Having 21 people provide 10 bookmarks each is a lot of links to go through - it's great, but it's a lot.
  
• don't require everyone to bookmark the class wiki (I know this was just part of the exercise, but it seems unnecessary to include this as part of a virtual introduction)
  
• make sure people include personalized descriptions with each link, so the rest of the class knows why the sites are important - I felt more connected to people when they did this
• to differentiate between the "virtual introduction" project and other bookmarking projects on delicious, use a specific tag (ex: scils598f08_intro)

Delicious vs. Magnolia

First of all, what's with the periods in del.icio.us and ma.gnolia? What purpose do those periods serve? They bother me. (It wouldn't bother me as much in ma.gnolia if it was placed at the syllable - mag.nolia - but it would still bother me.)

Now that that's out of the way, each service has its pros and cons. So... list time!

Delicious...
- has a simple, clean interface.
- intuitive bookmarking - comes up with suggested title, tags
- integrates with Firefox (and probably other browsers too)
- separates tags with a space, so you have to tag with oneword or one_word (which annoys me, but not as much as the periods in the middle of words thing)

Magnolia...
- has an aesthetically pleasing website
- adding a bookmark through the site is cumbersome - it doesn't suggest title or tags
- separates tags with commas, not spaces, so no oneword or one_word tags
- puts the "social" in "social bookmarking" with its many public groups

That said, I'm a Delicious user. It's become a web standard, and I don't think I'd switch. Maybe it was just me, but I had a lot of problems logging into Magnolia and bookmarking sites (had to click the "go" link several times before it would let me bookmark something, had to copy and paste the link directly from the browser).

Social software that's new to me...

I was intrigued by the idea of social bookmarking, and was happy to see it included in this class. In playing around with the websites on the sidebar of the wiki, I came upon Delicious. It looked like a cool way to aggregate my bookmarks from my home computer, my work computer, and my boyfriend's computer. I played around with it and fell in love. All of my bookmarks are now in one place, and they're totally organized.

I especially like how tags work in Delicious. In my personal Firefox bookmarks, every bookmark has a folder, or in many cases, a subfolder. I can't just call a blog a blog, it's a fashion blog, a tv blog, etc., and each has it's own subfolder. In Delicious, instead of creating folder upon folder, the tags function so they both separate and coallate bookmarks. It's easy to sort through the tags to find what I want. I also like that there's a Firefox-supported plugin. Instead of copying and pasting links, I just hit the add button. It took a little time to get it set up and organized, but maintenance is very simple.

Overall, a great little piece of social software, especially helpful if you have bookmarks on several computers.