Social Bookmarking and Collecting Topical Websites

---

September 27, 2008 - 11:50 am email to a friend printer friendly view / write comments

(0 votes, average: 0 out of 5)
You need to be a registered member to rate this post.

 Loading ...

Dr. West

You may have noticed that a few new icons now appear at the bottom of posts (you’ve been reading the posts, right?!). These are a series of websites that all offer the service of social bookmarking.

From left to right, these link to websites known as digg, stumbleupon, furl, reddit, and delicious. Cute icons and names, perhaps, but what do they do?

We’re all familiar with the ability to use your web browser to bookmark a site, but this has limitations. I don’t find it especially easy to categorize them, the results are only available from one particular computer, and they’re only available to you. Social bookmarking sites allow communal bookmarking, so that people with shared interests can designate certain web pages as being interesting, while also potentially tagging multiple web pages on a related topic as being a valuable collection. And importantly, none of us has the ability to see everything out there on the internet, so we can benefit from exploring leads suggested by other people.

   On a social bookmarking site, a group of people from all over the world can add to a list, and the posts that receive the most bookmarks automatically rise to the top when people search for information about that subject. If you want to add a web page with valuable information about tarceva, for instance, you can add a “tag” of tarceva when you bookmark the page, and then you and other people can search for information about tarceva and find it and other useful pages added by others.

Bev (member gonehiking) deserves a tip of the hat, a debt of gratitude for recognizing the value of aggregating all of the relevant posts and discussion thread comments accumulated over the last several years, on GRACE and previously on the OncTalk websites for both tarceva (here) and alimta (here). She spent a lot of time doing this incredibly valuable service, but now it falls on her to maintain the lists because only she can modify her posts.  With a social bookmarking site, many people can contribute jointly.

Another advantage of social bookmarking is that you can find sites you’ve bookmarked from any computer, not just your computer and your browser.   Each of the social bookmarking sites has some of its own features, such as group functions, etc., and that I’m no expert about this stuff and have no real preference of one over another. I believe that digg is the most popular one, but more tech-savvy people may have reasons to recommend one over another. I’d welcome comments and suggestions from others out there who have experience using these sites.

One final advantage of social bookmarking sites is that they allow people to find new information from unexpected places. I’d expect that there are helpful websites other than OncTalk and GRACE for people seeking information about cancer, and people can use these sites to make lists that other people, including me, can follow. People from here can find new information from other places, and people who have never found their way to the GRACE website can be directed to it from the recommendations of enough people who “digg” a particular post or thread. You can help people you’ve never met that need cancer information find it here by recommending the pages from here and elsewhere that you find most helpful. The more recommendations a page receives, the easier it becomes to find on a search.

A few more things are on the way. We’ll need to add these icons on the pages for discussion forum topics and places like the GRACE home page or lung cancer vertical as well. That should be easy. Also, for those who aren’t interested in dealing with social bookmarking websites, which require you to register an account, we’ll also add a simple rating function for GRACE posts, where registered GRACE users to provide feedback about which topics and writing styles they find most or least helpful. We want to make it easy for people to tell us what you want.

Posted in: General                     email to a friend printer friendly