I often do research online. GIYF after all. I was doing some research
at work (on SCORM - specifically the
different versions between 1.2 and 2004) and, upon finding a good
resource, I did my usual and bookmarked it, in case I wanted to
come back to review it.
For bookmarking, I use del.icio.us - as
I've mentioned before. When you add a del.icio.us bookmark you
can see how many other people have also bookmarked it. Seeing that
others had bookmarked the same link, I followed this link. I then
reviewed what other links each person put in similar
categories.
For example, bookmarking a page on SCORM version 1.2, I could
following the tags: SCORM, elearning, & version-1.2. I could
then see other pages that had the same tags.
It's like a pre-filtered list of relevant links pertaining to a
topic. Instead of all pages that Google thinks is related to a
specific query, you see what other humans have linked to. You can
review anyone's public bookmarks (by searching or by tag) but was
particularly interesting was that I started from a page I had
found: so I was looking just at what other people found - but only
people who also thought that same page was good. It was a smaller
set of people - and it was people who had already shown some
similarity of preference to me.
I think this could be a very useful research mechanism.