Social bookmarking

While I've had a del.icio.us account for a while now - well, okay at least a couple weeks - I hadn't really given much thought to the social aspects of it, or the fact that I could use it for "research" purposes beyond basic reference. I knew it could solve the problem of being able to access my carefully gathered bookmarks from places other than my work desktop, but I hadn't really taken a look at others' tagged links much or thought about my links being useful to others. Could it be useful for research? The CiteULike is interesting, although I didn't see many citations that were reviewed, and it didn't seem much worth it to bother with CiteULike, when other databases covered much more than what seemed available there. Still, I just finished writing an article with colleagues both local and across country. We set up a Google Docs page to draft the piece, and I can think of a couple instances in that experience where posting links to highly relevant journal articles and websites might have been very useful to each other in the process. And of course, del.icio.us can come in very handy in the day-to-day reference interaction. One of the sites I tagged in del.icio.us a while back was OR-Live: Online Surgical and Healthcare Video and Webcasts which was also tagged by over 260 others. I could definitely see creating a del.icio.us account for particular user communities, such as consumer health, public health, medical education, etc.

I'll have to revisit CiteULike again before I make up my mind about it.