Social Bookmarking Soul Mate

GAPCarey has a delicious account. For that small minority of you who might think that the previous sentence refers to an account with an exceedingly pleasurable taste, you are wrong. Delicious, formerly known as “del.icio.us” is, according to the all-knowing Wikipedia, “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.” In other words, GAPCarey, whose real name is a complete mystery to me, bookmarks websites that he (though for all I know GAPCarey might be a she, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll assume he’s a he) finds interesting and then shares those bookmarks with anyone in the world who wants to look at them. However, the best part about GAPCarey and his delicious account is not simply that he tags things and shares them, but rather what he tags and shares.

The top ten most common tags on GAPCarey account are, in order: science, education, biology, resources, interactive, tools, animations, web2.0, math, and teaching. The research project I am working on is about how animations can be used as interactive teaching tools to enhance medical education in specific as well as biology and science education in general. So GAPCarey and his delicious account have potential to be a really great resource for me in my research and also probably has links to a lot of interesting things that I may want to comment on in this blog. He just might be, as one of my professors would say, my “social bookmarking soul mate.” However, before we make any conclusions, let us examine GAPCarey more thoroughly so that we may be equipped to make the most accurate decision possible.

We already know what he tags. Now the question is, how does he tag? The first word that comes to mind? Prolifically. He adds probably an average of two or three new bookmarks per day and has bookmarked 831 sites using hundreds of different tagging categories. Most of the time, he doesn’t write any comments, but simply tags them the site with anywhere from one to nine different tags. Sometimes, he does have some comments, but only on about one in 20 bookmarks or so. This is slightly disappointing, because comments can give so much information about whether a site is helpful or not. However, regardless of the lack of comments, I was able to find a few really interesting sites

One of GAPCarey’s bookmarks led me to the “BioInteractive” section within the Howard Hughes Medical Institute website. This site has dozens of animations on multiple topics including, biodiversity, infectious diseases, neuroscience, cancer, obesity, evolution, immunology and DNA. I even found one of the animations about DNA replication that my molecular biology teacher showed us a few weeks ago. Another site I found through GAPCarey’s bookmarks is the Virtual Medical Centre (judging by the spelling of “centre” and by the narrator’s accent, it is a UK-based website), which has over 250 medical animations to help explain various medical conditions as well as common medical procedures. Both of these are really great resources and the quality of the animations is quite good as well.

However, while I did find these two very interesting sites, I had to sift through quite a few other less helpful bookmarks to do so. It seems that GAPCarey’s interest differ from mine in a few key ways. First, while I am mostly interested in medical and biological animations, he is interested in all fields of science. Secondly, many of GAPCarey’s bookmarks tags as “animations” contain 2d animations as well as, or instead of 3d ones. While 2d animations certainly have their place, I’m really not that interested in them for the purposes of my research or for this blog. In conclusion, then, I think that GAPCarey’s bookmarks may be a good research source for me (and for all of you who actually read my blog), but there are enough differences in our interests that we’ll still have to do a considerable amount of sorting. So as a social bookmarking soul mate, I think he gets a 7 out of 10.