Romancing the Bookmark


flickr photo shared by M Kuhn under a Creative Commons ( BY-NC-SA ) license

Oh I am guilty of having as guest the great Alan Levine and I haven’t even greeted him webwise! I am so happy to have him stay one full month with us the the STEMmED Project here at Sagrado. Alan is a precious mind and person to have around and I am ruthlessly taking advantage of him!! (Also having good tacos with him, though).

Alan is giving me great ideas with my New Media class and other stuff, and I am really grateful! This post is to share some of the ideas we have been elaborating in the past days.

I threw at Alan my old worry that I’m not able any longer to pull all bookmarks for one specific tag from the universe of, say diigo or delicious. Once upon a time there was this thing called “social bookmarking” and I still dream of having a distributed database of bookmarks for this class, grouped by tags, to which anybody from the class could contribute. It is impossible with diigo and inconsistent (to my experience) with delicious.com. The idea of installing one’s own service is great, and we’re exploring it, but we know we’re not taking advantage of other users not belonging to a class, but whose bookmarks are worth looking at.

Alan’s point that this is a sort of old-school quixotesque pursuit is valid, though: Does all this make sense? I love his idea of trying out a subreddit for inf115 (and this we’ll definitively explore with the class!), since it adds the upvoting feature, and then we could catch all the notes surfacing. But it is still not like having the distributed database I could have with the old delicious. So, is this just a capricious pursuit or does it still make sense? Alan says people don’t seem too eager about saving bookmarks… I know I still am.

A question to you students: Do you bookmark? Where? Do you think it is worthwhile to build and grow a categorized list of resources for the class? Tweet about it, please?

In all cases, I’m learning a lot in the process, including to use Alan’s tools to properly cite and attribute authorship to flickr images!!

About Antonio Vantaggiato

Professor, web2.0 enthusiast, and didactic chef.
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