I have talked bookmarking tools before (see my post on Diigo), but I stumbled across a cool one – one with a graphic interface – and decided I needed to share. Symbaloo lets you create a “mix”, or a group of links, on virtually any topic, and then share them with others. You can even gather your favorite rss feeds on a page, so if you still miss Google Reader (from way back), you can stay up-to-date on the blogs/pages you follow.
It is a bit similar to Pinterest, but where Pinterest is all about the visual images and ideas, Symbaloo is more about actual bookmarking. Click on a tile and you go directly to that website. Group a set of tiles together as resources instead of just gathering ideas for future use. Add their bookmarker tool to your browser and you can add tiles even quicker. Plus, did I mention you have direct access to your rss feeds?
I can see using Symbaloo as a home page – a place to start the day with links to all the websites you might use. Or, gather together a bunch of great links and create a webmix for others. A number of schools and school libraries already use it to craft a usable bank of resources for students. Public libraries could do this for author websites, or device help, or whatever else we have lists of links for. With Symbaloo, we can make it graphical – and, since there’s an app for it – there’s access to all these awesome websites from anywhere.
Check out the small sample webmix I created for Library blogs. Of course, it takes a little bit of time to set up, but it’s relatively easy, and with our world becoming more and more icon/graphical/visual-based, this turns that list of old bookmarks into something a bit more fun to use.