When I posted some alternate uses for blogs in the public sector, one of the suggestions that I floated was for a linkblog as an internal communications tool. This started me thinking about other uses for del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites, including the obvious use: as a site for storing your bookmarks…
If you haven’t used del.icio.us before, this video will provide you with a pretty good introduction to what should be a standard tool for a public sector communicator.
Other uses for del.icio.us
Aside from sharing bookmarks with your colleagues, there are a couple of other ways to use this service that might be of some benefit.
Media clippings
Still photocopying or clipping media articles and storing them in a filing cabinet somewhere? Why? Save them all to a social bookmarking site and, apart from saving yourself hours of drudgery, you will have an online database of clippings that can not only be tagged, making it a far more efficient system that you are likely to have in place now, but can be syndicated via RSS or exported to HTML and backed up.
Another advantage of these services is that, now the mainstream media is all online, you can bookmark video. But I would recommend that if you want to start saving video from the local news sites, you upload your own copies to YouTube; the concept of persistent URLs seems to be anathema to the local broadcasters.
Links for media releases
Part of the social media release template is a specific del.icio.us page featuring links to related material. This is particularly useful in the public sector where we have to be careful about linking to commercial web pages. Rather than host a list of links on your agency site, you can store these links in del.icio.us and point people to that page. As an example, you can see the e-government links for Google.
Reference database
I found this ingenious use of del.icio.us via delineator, a tranche of Parliamentary Questions relating to specific topics saved by kiwimp.
Unfortunately, this highlights one of the problems with this method. All of the bookmarks in kiwimp’s account point to the old Clerk of the House site and there doesn’t appear to be a sufficient level of detail in the redirect table to the new Parliament site, so every link painstakingly saved, tagged and annotated by kiwimp is broken.
Still, a brilliant idea. You could easily save, for example, all the legislation relevant to your agency and use tags to categorize it to increase it’s discoverability and usability. Or all your PQs, Minister’s media releases and speeches, videos, whatever.
Conclusion
Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are an invaluable tool for public relations professionals, whether working in the public or private sectors. The ability to save and tag countless web pages and share them with others that follow the same interests cannot be underestimated.
Similarly, seeing what other people are saving under tags you are interested in supports your ability to track issues and follow conversations that you might otherwise miss.
More experienced users of del.icio.us may want to have watch this Jon Udell screencast for a more detailed look at the power of social bookmarking.
11 Comments
We’veI’ve been using del.icio.us here in our research team.It’s a great way to store all those interesting sites members of the team would normally email to each other. I set up an account in our name, and the entire team can access it.
The interesting thing about del.icio.us is that you can have it open under the same name on multiple machines, meaning that the entire team has access to the same bookmarks.
Consistent tagging is an issue, but hey…
…and if the links don’t break, it makes a pretty good record of material accessed and referenced.
As for consistent tagging, I think that the looser the better. See this post on folksonomies providing 70% more terms than taxonomies in enterprise organizations.
Yeah, but broken links are normal for the internet. They’re one of the foibles we put up with.
Maybe someone can write some software that scans and checks your bookmarks on a regular basis, informing you when one is out of date.
Bookmarking oral questions under the kiwimp username at del.icio.us was an experiment on the path to developing TheyWorkForYou.co.nz.
I wrote a program that bookmarked the oral question transcripts. It automatically created tags for items like the minister being questioned and the MPs that spoke. At the time I wanted to emphasize how tag bundles could be used to group tags into semantically meaningful categories, which makes ad-hoc querying easier.
Kiwimp is also the name of the sourceforge.net project where I store the free open source software code for TheyWorkForYou.co.nz.
Thanks Rob: and I eventually stumbled across it because I had added you to my del.icio.us network. Surely another reason to use the service…
And
Notwithstanding copyright I assume Jason.
- newspapers too and there are commercial reasons for this.
Of course Sam - point taken re YouTube. Exporting bookmarks, though, surely is within the scope of legitimate use?
Sorry Jason it has been a few years since I studied IP law - and I am not too sure what you mean by exporting bookmarks.
Exporting to a HTML file a list of all the URLs that point to the copyrighted material. I can’t see how this would be a breach, but I’m not a lawyer…
I think you are right there Jason. On a personal level though, my big hope is that the news industry make a better job of managing copyright in the modern interconnected world than the music industry did.
Amen to that, Sam.