Okay, so we’ve started to find some useful / poor / interesting / pointless websites and information contained therein. So what’s the best way to keep track, manage and share them with others? well that would be social bookmarking. Using this tool (and there are a few variations out there, see the list at the bottom of this page) it is possible to manage everything you find on the Internet and usually it’s as easy as clicking a button and adding a few words. Because a whole load of other people are doing the same, then the system becomes even more useful by rating the best and worse that’s out there. There are so many benefits to using social bookmarking that it’s best to just get in there and try it out.

Let’s have a look at Delicious. All you need to start is a valid email address, you may already have one, you may have one or two. Ever thought of having one simply to sign up to all these services? as a kind of gateway? Anyway, back to Delicious. Again, we don’t want to tell you how to use it here, they do it much better than we could on their help page, so head over there to get started.
You can find all our bookmarks on there so add us into your network and we’ll do the same. similar to how we did on twitter. It’s up to you whether any of our bookmarks are of any use to you, but in any case, please let us know how you get on. Remember, it’s all about the conversation.

A few Social Bookmarking sites

Delicious

Stumble Upon

Furl

Stuart and I spent today in Coventry at Grapevine, a charity whose vision is “that people with learning disabilities are included in everyday life and enjoy lives enriched by having valued roles and being ‘connected’ to communities.” ‘Connected’ and ‘communities’ are words that fit well in the ethos of empowering people with social media skills, so we were happy to go along and see what we could do to help.

The guys and girls at Grapevine today were part of a media skills course, led by Denise Stokes, they are learning about how news works – what makes it and how it’s told. The course already has a blog — but at the moment it’s written by the tutors, by the end of the course the hope is that the trainees will have taken over.

We split the group into two, and tried to find out what each person wanted from the internet — the replies ranging from “the news” to “Elvis”.

There are already a couple of keen photographers in the training group, so Flickr seemed a good way to get everybody involved. First we looked for some pictures of The King, and Geraldine was really happy to find a group of photos of Elvis impersonators — nine Elvi obviously being better than one. We forget so easily how the simple skills of being able to find things on the ‘net that we enjoy can open up tons of opportunities — a ‘divide’ that can be so easily crossed if done in an engaging way.

The next stage was to get someone up and running and sharing, so Alan (already very into photography) took a photo and had his own Flickr account within minutes.

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