Social Bookmarking and Syndication

Social Bookmarking Service

I choose del.icio.us for my social bookmarking service for two reasons. First, it has been around longer than Diigo and would have fewer quirks; I just wanted to keep it simple for now. Second, I watched a demo video by the Common Craft and that was enough. I found the social bookmarking better than the either blog search programs. I actually found a great blog site called 100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner | College@Home that has great tools for different learning styles – great for differentiated instruction in a performance-based school. This system seems to be streamlined and less cumbersome that the blog search tools as well.

Home Page Syndication

I choose Google Reader for my syndication aggregator, because I have my blog with Google. I also wanted to try something different from Bloglines, which I am using presently. At this point I like Google better. It has a "mark as all read" feature that I like to use. I also like the discover feature which is like an Amazon recommendations feature based on your current blog subscription. The settings are intuitive and easy to work. Setting up folders will allow me to easily manage all of the subscriptions. The brevity of XML really allows me to sift through a lot of reading for salient information that will better keep me abreast of technology and information.

Jeff Szarzi