Introduction

Social bookmarking is typically our starting point when we introduce the participatory web to students in our own classes. We take this approach because:

• social bookmarking is typically a personal productivity service students find immediately useful, and


• it is possible to illustrate a wide variety of participatory web attributes using social bookmarking as an example.

The combination of a tool that is likely to generate personal experiences and the related opportunity to reference more general attributes of the participatory web using these personal experiences as a context offers an approach we feel is productive.

Personal Productivity

Before we turn to how bookmarking might fit with the other tools and practices of the participatory web, let us explain how a bookmarking tool might benefit you personally.

We are making what we think are reasonable assumptions here. We assume that:

• you use the Internet to locate a wide variety of information resources and productivity services,


• the number of online sites you access over an extended period of time would be relatively large, and


• you access the Internet from various locations and using several computers.

As Internet resources play a larger and larger role in our professional lives, we are faced with the challenge of keeping track of the resources we use. The bookmarking feature available within the browser on your personal computer provides a commonly applied solution and a solution suited to accessing the resources you use most frequently. However, this solution is not suited to maintaining and searching a large collection - hundreds or thousands of links - or to the dilemma we face when using multiple machines. Most of us now own several machines (yes, you can synch bookmarks across machines, but most users do not synch their resources) and students may use equipment made available to them in computer labs.

A social bookmarking service allows a user at no expense to maintain a large collection of bookmarks and related information on a remote server. This collection is password protected and can be accessed using a standard browser from any computer connected to the Internet. The opportunity to store additional information with bookmarks, to tag the bookmarks according to personal priorities, and to use multiple search techniques (search text, tags) offers additional advantages in comparison to the limited bookmarking systems available within a standard browser.

Here is one final advantage you may want to consider. All computers eventually fail and while we all probably understand the importance of backing up the resources on this equipment, this practice is not as common as it should be. Maintaining a large collection of bookmarks on a remote site offers some protection against the loss of this collection. The reputation of these sites depends on their reliability and these sites have the resources to safeguard your data.