Wednesday 10 December 2008

Social bookmarking isn't quite social enough for me

I've had limited success in finding delicious doctors. Well, I might have found some and I don't know. I have certainly come across a few people who are very good at tagging sites relevant to me. But it is a little bit frustrating that I can not get in contact with these people, who are interested in the same things as me, to find out who they are and what they do. They might even be part of the elusive medical education community!

There is no way to directly contact another user in delicious if they do not have a website or email address listed. So I have to resort to other methods to make contact. I can join them to my network, send them a link and add a hello message to the note I tag, but I can't just send them a message.

Maybe there are good reasons for this. Maybe it prevents spam. But maybe it is just because delicious don't think it is very relevant. On their help page they state that your network might consist of "even new people you run across while exploring Delicious" so it doesn't seem to be considered a primary purpose of the site. Anyway, I have contacted them to find out and will let you know. I'll also tell you if anyone has responded to my strange hello notes!

6 comments:

  1. I think part of the joy of delicious is that it focuses on 'weak links' (i.e. between people) rather than facilitating strong ones (which require a significant overhead to maintain) - it knows that there are plenty of other tools for that around - for example facebook. It knows it's niche.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have put my contact details at the top of my delicious page.

    ReplyDelete
  3. So I'm thinking about a medical education delicious site to replace http://medicaleducation.wetpaint.com/page/Self+Directed+Learning because the number of sites is unwieldy for a webpage.

    Want to join me?

    ReplyDelete
  4. I'm finding that not many of my new colleagues have heard of Delicious or social bookmarking. I don't know whether this is typical or whether it perhaps helps explain why the medical/health professions education community we're both looking for seems not to exist. I like Deirdre's suggestion of a medical education delicious site, however I wonder whether Diigo might be a better option as it also supports a forum which might help facilitate more discussion and network building.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Mike You know, my first post about delicious said that what I liked was it's simplicity. I don't want to be sending messages back and forward in Delicious, just have the ability to tell shy people who don't list their contact details, that I would like to say hello, and find out how I could contact in other ways eg twitter. In any case, if people click to see their network and notice that I am their fan, they have the option of contacting me and that is probably sufficient.

    @Sarah Yes, I followed your example:)

    @Deirdre. I can't actually see the links page on the wiki. But if I could there would be two options. Either to set up an account for 'Medical Education' abd make sure that we all individually send links to that account- but someone would have to take responsibility for administering the account.... or we just all join each other's networks and get disciplined about using medicaleducation as a tag.

    @Natalie
    The other functions comes back to the original posting and Mike's comment/my response. I am concluding that you want Delicious to do what it can do and let other networking tools like blogs and twitter do the rest. Trying to put everything in one place is probably a mistake becuase tools will come and go. And... I only logged into Diigo once so am not familiar.

    I was wondering if we could have continued this conversation on Twitter using a hashtag like #SBMedEd for SocialBookmarking Medical Education?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hi all - i stumbled upon delicious and have been tagging some evidence based practice stuff for a few months - & noticed today that AnneMarie had posted a link on my list (Wrexhamrob -on delicious)
    -great that you have linked on my page
    -i can now review tags
    -is there a way that we can comment on each others tags etc
    -as a National Prescribing Centre Therapeutics Trainer - feel i should now tag some of mine 'trustedsources' which i have started MHRA, NICE,Cinical Evidence etc
    -i think we can develop trusted sources some more, as those of involved in medical/clinical education need to spread the word- the 'Information Mastery' floors @ NPCi are about to be updated in next few weeks ,
    -more comments later, all best Rob Davies Prescribing Advisr/Prescribing Pharmacist Wrexham

    ReplyDelete

I am reintroducing word verification to cut back on spam posts. I'm sorry if you find it frustrating,