Bookmarking

For this challenge we have been asked to explore some of the bookmarking tools which are currently available.  In my early rush of enthusiasm, I actually started to explore, use and blog about these quite early on.  To avoid repetition, hesitation or deviation (!) please see my blog entries in May:

Exploring Blogs and Rediscovering Pinterest (30th April 2013)

Evernote (2nd May 2013)

Delicious Social Bookmarking (8th May 2013)

I think the only thing to add is that I must confess to not having found a bookmarking tool which is absolutely perfect for everything!  Each tool has its own strengths and weaknesses, being ideal for some purposes, but not for others. To be a perfect tool for me, I think I would like to have more control over the layout and organisation of the bookmarks - this is certainly the case with Delicious, which I use a lot, but which still leaves me a little dissatisfied due to its slightly clunky, unattractive and inflexible operation.  Pearltrees, I hardly dare comment about, as I think I must be a vertical organiser, and not a horizontal one!

Delicious Social Bookmarking

Yesterday I set up a new Delicious account in an effort to keep track of all these useful Web 2.0 technologies I am discovering these days. Delicious has been described by one enthusiastic blogger as "the king of social bookmarking" (Kristi Hines).  If it helps me to keep track of the rapidly multiplying resources I am using, then I shall be quite content with that. I am hoping that using tags will help me to retrieve useful links even when my collection grows large, and that it will also serve to remind me of less used, but still useful sites.  There are many, many more ways in which Delicious can be used (see Kristi's article above) but this will do for now.

Evernote

Today I set up an Evernote account. I must confess to tweeting about how thrilled I was with it. I hope such a display of enthusiasm wasn't too unprofessional! Many thanks to Debs for recommending it during our staff training day. It really is worth exploring if you have a little time. You can effortlessly save a huge variety of things including web pages, blog articles, images, and notes, and can sync it with your mobile, tablet, PC, laptop etc, etc, so you can access it from numerous devices. It is easy to annotate items, create to do lists and search the contents. I was rather wondering how such a marvelous tool could be free. It was shortly after that that I discovered if you want to be able to save documents (Word docs etc), and be able to search them, then you need to subscribe on a monthly basis. And as Evernote is designed to remember things "forever", that could be quite a hefty income stream for them!

Exploring Blogs & Rediscovering Pinterest

Today's new challenge has been to explore other blogs, which I have already begun to do.  I spent some time over the last couple of weeks exploring colleagues' blogs. As well as posting comments, I also posted an article(?) on the BPC Library 2.0 blog, entitled "Have you got a Google+ profile?" to help colleagues who's blogs could not yet be seen by the rest of the group. I have had feedback (via email) that this was helpful for at least one individual.

I was very interested to discover via Marianne's blog that she has begun a Pinterest board for Teaching Information Skills. It was quite inspiring to see these resources displayed in such an attractive and visual way via Pinterest. My sole use of Pinterest previously has been to display research into library furniture and design. However seeing this has inspired me to create my own Online Learning & Development board on Pinterest to capture some of the best Web 2.0 and other online resources I discover: or at least those that are visually appealing!