Social Bookmarking

After using delicious.com for almost a week now, I'd say that its capabilities and powers far surpass my uses. I am always on one of either 2 computers, both with the same bookmarks. When I combine that with the fact that I', able to spend less and less time on the internet with a growing family and added responsibilities at home, delicious was something that kept me online longer than I should have been a few too many times this week.
The most productive time I spent surfing the links of other delicious.com folks was after I bookmarked Discovery's United Streaming.com and teachertube at delicious because I wanted to see what others who bookmarked unitedstreaming.com tagged as 'educational' or 'language arts' and so forth. It was much easier to flip through another teachers bookmarked pages, and what they thought was was good content out there online, much more helpful then just a list of sites (no matter how well organized google, bing, yahoo, and the likes can make those lists) which is all those search engines really are, lists. What I was most intrigued about during the reading last week was the new folksonomy tags that help categorize related information. It makes the bookmarking of a page much more involved, giving you the ability to choose key words that you think are most important in describing the content of the website and/or the purpose that its serves. These tags act as a lingual-web that connects you to others who tagged the same site, use the same tag words. The idea of a folksonomy made me think of my students and how many of them struggle to see deeper relationships between information rather than what's apparent of the surface. This tool would be able to help the see connections between their personal interests as well as educational connections if used for researching certain topics in each discipline. The science fair starts next week at my school and I've already told the science teacher for 7th and 8th grade how well delicious.com would work to locate related pages to the specific science fair project that they choose. Telling a student to find 3 or 4 pertinent websites about increased heart rate dependent on music genre (a popular topic the last couple years) it may take them up to a half-hour. If you tell them to find the best site they can about the topic, and the delicious.com can point them in the direction of 3/4 other related sites it would make the task less daunting to the student as well as giving them the chance to mentally sift through more related information.
Having all my bookmarks in one place to reference wherever, whenever is good, but the power of this application in education and research will play a much more important role as I teach my students how to use this and the many different ways it can be useful to them.