As I was penning next week’s batch of website reviews for my Surfnetkids.com site, the idea of “calling for links” popped into my head. Here’s what I mean:

Next week’s column (dated February 20) will be about Women’s History Month (which actually is March.) And I figured that my SharingLinks members would know about lots of sites that I didn’t . And wouldn’t it be great if we could share our discoveries for the benefit of everyone?

So .. here it is … a call (or plea!) for you to peruse the Internet and/or your own personal stash of links for those
pertaining to Women’s History Month … add them to your bookmarks at SharingLinks.com.

The sites can be about individual women, the women’s rights movement, women’s history, women’s suffrage, or any sub-topic that interests you (such as women artists, women scientists, etc!) The beauty of the tagging system is that we each build our own link collections and organize them as we wish.

Popular tags that already being used are:

women’s history, biography, history, social studies, educational stuff, suffrage, women

If you’d like a refresher on how to add links (my favorite way is with the SharingLinks plugin), you’ll find lots of help:

1) on the SharingLinks site

2) on the SharingLinks blog

In closing, I promise I will NOT be sending an email every week to call for links on a new topic, but if this little experiment is popular, I will definitely do it again!

As always, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

I rambled a bit about tagging, community, Web 2.0, folkosonomy and Sharing Links over at my BarbaraFeldman.com blog, and thought I should post an excerpt here as well:

Today’s rambling is about tags, folksonomy, and the sharing of knowledge. This is a topic that is both completely simple (a “tag” is a user-created label or keyword) and complex at the same time. If all users are creating their own tags (or labels or categories) .. then how do we find a common ground to share information or knowledge?

During the loosely defined Web 2.0 evolution, users stepped up to share in the online conversation. And user input (with votes, tags, and knowledge) became more important than the one-to-many publishing model. Business books with titles such as “The Wisdom of the Crowds,” “Wikinomics” and “We are Smarter than Me” began spouting the knowledge of the many.

It was in this spirit that I created Sharing Links, a place for educators to share their knowledge in the form of bookmarks and tags. The site is still in “Beta” because it is not yet finished in a technical sense, nor in a community sense. During the first few months of 2008, however, will I will be unfolding some new and pretty exciting next steps. …. click to continue.

Although we’ve been busy adding features to SharingLinks, it’s been awhile since I sent out email update. Some of these features are many weeks old, but I figure if you haven’t started using them yet, then they are still new to you! Here goes.

1) My Tags ButtonSince your tags are so important, we’ve added a My Tags button on the navigation that will take you directly to a list of all your tags. If you are new to tags, and are more accustomed to sorting your bookmarks into folders, you can think of these tags as your folders. But tags are more versatile, because a bookmark can easily have multiple tags, where it would be impossible to be in multiple folders (without creating duplicate bookmarks.)

Now your favorite fifth grade math links can be tagged both “mathâ€? and “grade 5″. For more on using the boolean + (and) with your tags, read this blog post Combing Tags ( http://blog.sharinglinks.com/combining-tags/52/ )

2) New Search Options

In the drop-down box for the search function, we have added a “tag� search. Now options include searching your bookmarks, your tags, all bookmarks and all tags. This will give you an easy way to jump directly to a tag page.

Keep in mind, the “search bookmarks� function will usually return more results than “search tag� because it also looks for the search phrase in titles and descriptions. Here’s two examples searching for “thanksgiving�:

For example, the search for Thanksgiving is:
http://www.sharinglinks.com/search/all/thanksgiving

And the list of bookmarks tagged Thanksgiving is:
http://www.sharinglinks.com/tags/thanksgiving

3) View All Tags

One of the best ways to discover new sites, is to click on users that have interesting bookmarks. For example, if something from user wildnis catches your attention, you can click on his username (his profile reveals that he is a he!) and find:

http://www.sharinglinks.com/bookmarks/wildnis

From here, you might notice the tag “photography� and if you click on it, will bring up all of wildnis’s photography bookmarks

http://www.sharinglinks.com/bookmarks/wildnis/photography

But what if you want to explore the tag “photography� from all users, not just wildis? That’s what the “View All: photography� link in the orange header bar is for. It means viewing the tag for all users (not just the current user you are browsing).

Clicking on it will take you to:
http://www.sharinglinks.com/tags/photography

4) Bookmarks Sorted by Popularity

Right at the top, in addition to sort by Date, Title, or URL, we’ve added Popularity. This sorts bookmarks by how many members have the exact same one. I have already gotten questions about why two seemingly similar URLs are not counted as the same. The answer is that (for or for worse) our program considers “domain.com/index.htm� different from “domain.com�.

Although there are a few more new features, I think this post is already way too long. Your comments welcome below.

Dear Barbara,
I like your new tagline.  You may want to consider using the ‘Share Links’ as the last item in the sequence.  It is your name and that way it functions as the payoff.  And anyway the natural order of events might logically be to save links,  discover new links and then share them with others.  Just a thought…

Best,
Christine Flaherty
Marketing Manager
Weston Woods Studios
Norwalk, CT 

Dear Christine,

You are so right!  Thanks for writing.  I have taken your advice, and changed the tagline so that “Share Links” is last.  Thank you for sharing your “marketing talent.”

Barbara