Social Bookmarking Tricks for Group Learning

Have I mentioned that I love getting questions. Recently I received two great questions, I'll address the first one in this post. The question was:

How are you posting the social bookmarking links on your site?

So let me answer that question first and then let me mention a couple of other things that you might want to do with Social Bookmarking tools.

Badges (Widgets)

The quick answer to the actual question is that I'm using a Yahoo MyWeb badge. You can see the badge creator and options (pages/cloud, tag filter, number of links, what to include) at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/myresults/badge

It produces a badge that looks like:

and gives you the code that you will need to either paste into your post, web page, blog template, etc.

You can do the same thing on del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls and most of the other Social Bookmarking services have similar capabilities.

RSS Feed With Search Results (and Subscribing)

In my article on Personal and Group Learning Using Web 2.0 Tools, I described a scenario where a workgroup would independently research a particular topic, e.g., Rapid eLearning, and would share those links under a particular tag, e.g., "rapid".

One neat trick using Social Bookmarking tools, is that you can easily create an RSS Feed for a particular term. In Yahoo MyWeb, there's an XML Button in the bottom right of result pages. I simply click that button and it will show me a page with a bunch of XML code. Anytime that search results is updated the RSS feed will be updated.

Now, the really neat part. You can easily subscribe to that feed. The URL of the XML code might be something like:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/tag/elearning/urls.xml

For me, all I have to do is either manually go to bloglines and subscribe, or use the trick of putting "bloglines.com/sub/" in front of the URL, e.g.,

bloglines.com/sub/http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/tag/elearning/urls.xml

I now will see any pages that are being tagged with eLearning. There are several researchers who use this approach publicly in order to allow people to share links on services like del.icio.us. See: http://www.fullcirc.com/weblog/2006/02/thinking-out-loud-our.htm for an example by Nancy White.

Which Tool?

If you look at the recent comparsion on Read/Write Web, you'll get a sense of some of the features of the different tools. But, I've commented before that I think Yahoo MyWeb better than del.icio.us, rollyo, et.al. for Personal / Group Learning and it comes down to:

• Saving copies of pages
• Limiting who sees what links
• Full-text search of contents of bookmarked pages

I'm hoping that eventually Yahoo MyWeb and del.icio.us merge (Yahoo owns both after acquiring del.icio.us).