Learn By Doing

A Lifelong Learner Shares Thoughts About Education

Google Bookmarks and Lists: Not The Same Old Thing

A number of posts crossed my desk over the last few days as Google released updates to its Google Bookmark service.  What I found surprised me and I think this tool is going to be amazingly useful in a classroom to make it easy to create lists around specific topics.

Recently I do keep a few Bookmarks in Firefox and use Xmarks to synchronize them.  I love this service and have used it since it was Foxmarks quite some time ago.  In addition to syncing my bookmarks, it keeps my QuickFox text files and my UpdateScanner setup synchronized across machines.  Xmarks is not foolproof though and I have frequently ended up with multiple copies of my bookmarks despite my best intentions.  I now keep Xmarks in check by only automatically updating on one machine and manually on the others.

I also store bookmarks in Delicious for reference and enjoy easily publishing them automatically on my WordPress sites using del.icio.us for WordPress.

I last tried Google Bookmarks a few months ago and found the disconnect between my GMail page, where I live, and the Google Toolbar, where I could find bookmarks easily, a bit hard to navigate. The first thing I noticed was how easily it imported my Firefox bookmarks and that sharing a List was easy.

That seems to be the least of what Bookmarks are useful for.  I was impressed with what a list actually is and what they are useful for.  Check out my Google Bookmarks public list and you will see this video (below) or this presentation.