Social Bookmarking and Syndication

Social Bookmarking
I explored three bookmarking services as part of this assignment.
1. Delicious is a site I have visited before. I never subscribed because I have an elaborate bookmarking system on my computer and did not see any need to duplicate bookmarks. When I want to share a site with someone - I add it to the email so they can link directly from an email. This is how I personally like to receive links. I can view the link directly from my email and I do not have to move around to the browser. I have seen other people's Delicious sites. They are usually not organized and not anything I would want to plow through. I did join Delicious and explored the options and links.
What I love about Delicious are the 'recent' and 'popular' lists. I enjoy going through those and always find spots that would never find any other way. The graphic design and life hacker sites are always interesting.
2. Ning for Educators
I explored this site but did not join. I think it is very similar to Classroom 2.0 and does many of the same things.
3. Diigo. I joined this site but had difficulty because I do not have administrative rights to my work computer where I usually do my assignments. I had to do this from my home computer.
I really like Diigo. It does more than just organize bookmarks. It allows you to research the web and organize what you find. Another good feature is that it allows you to annotate webpages for yourself or others. This is a good feature that I think would be helpful for teachers. I would not use it as a replacement for my bookmark folder but it would be useful for a specific project that is shared with several other people.
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Syndication
I have used Bloglines for my RSS syndication service for over two years. I like it very much and will continue to use it. I like the ease of subscription. The subscription button is always available and I can subscribe to any webpage that has RSS or XML. I also like the organization tools and folders. I can manage many feeds in a clean and simple way. The editing options are clear and easy to use. What I really appreciate is the simplicity of it. I hate busy websites!!! I like sites and services that are direct and clear. I don't like pictures and bells and whistles all over the place. Bloglines provides a clean interface that does not overwhelm.
For this assignment, I also subscribed to Google Reader. I chose Google because they are trustworthy and it is well-maintained. Other lesser-known services are unreliable and limited in scope.
The Google service is linked to all other Google services as well as gmail. I particularly liked the ease of subscription. It allowed you to browse or type in the URL. This was so convenient. The management tools and the list of subscriptions were easy to use. The webpage was too busy. But I think I could make this work.
I also subscribed to Twitter. I will need to explore this a bit more. I think you need to have a group or a purpose to fully understand the value of this. "what are you doing?" seemed a bit trivial.