Bookmarking in your browser or on one site is an inefficient way to store useful links on already public content.

Here at Teach Italian we adopt simple, powerful technologies like Social Bookmarking to maximize our collective knowledge.

Diigo Social Bookmarking

Our preferred choice for this is a free browser tool called Diigo 

It requires no downloads, just a button for your browser, so you can add bookmarks online and let them appear on this site automatically.

Adding bookmarks

Bookmarks can be added by using tag: teachit  (See Tutorial)

We also add other tags for detail, such as: teachers, children, language, funding, marketing etc. 

It is assumed that teachit relates to italian and italy

This list grows over time and can be shared with all users, as in the examples below.

Searching For Bookmarks

1. Enter tags to search
2. Enter tags or full text for deeper search
3. A list of bookmarks appears, with tags you searched listed
4. Each link returned shows you the other related tags for that link 
5. Username who saved it appears, allowing you to see all their other bookmarks
6. A 'cloud' of related tags appears to the right, helping you see the big picture of related items
7. Tag cloud can be sorted alphanumeric or by frequency to see which are most used 

Bookmarks in TeachItalian

Any bookmarks with tag teachit can be shown on this site.

That is why we encourage you to use this system for bookmarking.

You get to bookmark your own stuff, while helping to add value to this site (or your own organization's site) while you are doing this.

This allows us to leverage the collective wisdom of all our users.

We can also pull any other lists of tags from the site -- the possibilities are limitless --  the teachit tag just guarantees we have a way for members of this site to make those important bookmarks unique.

Using (rss)http://diigo.com/rss/tag/teachit(/rss) we get:

This list will grow and change as our community adds bookmarks with tag: teachit

You can also just browse Diigo directly

Tag Combinations

To refine the list, you can search for multiple tags like:

Using (rss)http://diigo.com/rss/tag/teachit,teachers(/rss) we get:

Usage

Now that you understand this method, use it for your own organization.

Tag bookmarks with other members with a unique term like pdxit, etc. and you now can group all your public bookmarks into one 'special' group list, and using RSS show them at other sites and locations.

Social Bookmarking Resources

Applying this principle fully, here are my bookmarks on social bookmarking.

Delicious remains the undisputed heavyweight in this arena, so check them out as well. I prefer Diigo becaus of its research-oriented highlighting system.