Discovery 8 – Keeping track

Discover

Do you keep a list of favourites in Internet Explorer? What about bookmarks in Firefox?

Different browsers call them different things but they are all essentially the same. Favourites and bookmarks allow you to save the url (uniform resource locator or “link”) to a website in your browser for quick reference at a later date.

They are super easy to add and very useful. However how many times have you lost bookmarks? It might be that your hard drive in your computer fails or the IT guy forgets to back them up for you when he is repairing your computer.

Online bookmarking provides us with a website where we can keep a bookmarks safe from all of the aforementioned disasters. Plus you can access your online bookmarks from any internet computer, anywhere.

There are a host of online bookmarking sites but we will only cover two here. Delicious and Digg

Play

Visit Delicious and search for some topics that interest you. Look at what is popular, see who bookmarked those sites, and then keep on clicking to see what other related sites that person also bookmarked.

Visit Digg and look at the most popular articles. Try to sort them by popularity or recency. Play with some settings to organise the list. Do a search for something that interests you and see which articles have the most diggs.

Connect!

Create a user account on Delicious and bookmark some websites. Use Delicious as a search engine for interesting websites and see what is popular. You can even add an RSS feed to your aggregator of popular bookmark topics.

Create a user account on Digg and digg some articles. use this daily as a means to keep up with the bleeding edge news on any search items or currently trending topics. Use the functionality of digg to sort your list into “most dugg” or “newest first” to help organise your news items.

Finally, don’t forget to update your learning blog with some thoughts and comments about online bookmark services.