Week 3 Assignment: Social Bookmarking and Folksonomy

Introduction
Social bookmarking involves saving a bookmark to a public website eg del.icio.us and tagging with keywords. The benefit is that you can access the link from any computer (unlike when saving in your favourites) and others can share your bookmarking. Folksonomy (as opposed to taxonomy) is the classification (keyword / s) used to identify what you’ve bookmarked.

Connotea
For this assignment I’m concentrating on Connotea. Connotea is a free reference management tool that enables you to save and organise links to references, which can be shared with others, saved with one click (after setting-up a Link) and accessed via any computer. Connotea appeals to me because I have found that Reference Manager (which I have used a number of times) is somewhat frustrating to use and requires download of a large file to enable the storage of references, and the added disadvantage of others needing to download the software before being able to access the records (time consuming and takes up a fair amount of disk storage). So as you may appreciate Connotea is worth considering as a reference management tool. I have to say after trying it out I am initially impressed – I completed a Medline search, selected the article to save (tick box) and simply clicked the Links button (that I previously set-up) and there it was saved to my site. I did this a few times for practice and just clicked the My Library icon, and there were my saved articles, which of course anyone could access. I am hoping to promote Connotea to my users who request literature searches but to begin will use it more frequently myself to get to know any negative points that it may have. Will keep my fellow bloggers informed!