Social Bookmarking

CiteULike
http://www.citeulike.org/

CiteULike seems like a brilliant idea for academics and professionals, especially for someone involved in writing up research/thesis/dissertation. Being able to save the citations for one's bibliography at the click of a mouse would be really useful. It becomes a bit more laborious if it's not an article from one of the journal archiving groups which Citeulike currently supports, but worth the extra typing or cutting and pasting to keep everything together. The list it supports is pretty comprehensive, although I notice it doesn't support either Dialog or Proquest! The reason it only supports certain groups is to ensure that only peer-reviewed articles are publicised on the site - this prevents spamming and people posting articles to advertise particular sites.

It would be a useful tool for libraries to be able to save search citations - these could then be shared with the relevant user(s). By choosing appropriate tags, it could be used as a current awareness service.

Once you have signed up, you can browse the postings in a topic and find other users with similar interests and see what they've posted. You can add pages that you're interested in to your watchlist so that when something new is added to that page you are alerted. This means you don't have to keep visiting the page because all the articles on all the pages you are interested in are aggregated in chronological order.

My only criticism is that there's no Help facility and it was quite difficult to find out how to delete a posting.

The idea of social bookmarking in general seems a good one for libraries. It would be useful to share bookmarks amongst library staff, both locally and more widely. From my own point of view it would be a much better way to save my bookmarks because I'm constantly moving from one computer to another.

Blogs

Well, it is a bit sad doing my homework on a Bank holiday, but here are my thoughts on blogs.

In order to generate discussion, they need to have stimulating content and it's important to keep the purpose of the blog in mind - headlines need to be relevant and meaningful. Regular posting keeps readers interested, but it seems that long posts, as long as they are well written, get more comment and links.

For use in a library context, I like the interactivity aspect of having a blog and being able to get immediate user feedback. One could be used for current awareness services. However, a lot of promotion would need to be done in order to make users aware of it. We are already aware that large numbers of our users don't even know of the existence of our website and online library catalogue which have been around for years!