Friday, April 04, 2008

Web 2.0: Week 4--Social Bookmarking

Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

After having had a chance to utilize social bookmarking, I have mixed feeling about this tool.

On one hand, this tool proves useful for a social network of people in research assistance. In addition to this, if the people utilizing this service use similar terms for the same types of information, the same users could benefit from the group knowledge. Because this tool is online, users are less likely to be subject to a "group thinking" mentality and can share their uniqueness in bookmarking and tagging.

On the other hand, social bookmarking is only as good as the people who use it. If a veteran cataloguer were to use his/her skills to socially bookmark, then many could benefit from his/her expertise that would be bound by cataloging rules. Because, social bookmarking is open to everyone, language, dialects and general understanding of words are certainly barriers for its usefulness.

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