Yummy Delicious Bookmarks

Thanks Anne for saying that Delicious is boring! Why do you say that? Since this weeks' task says to investigate Delicious, we're doing it. Anne, I'd love to hear about the other social bookmarking tools that are out there. Tell me all about it!

In the meantime, I'll have a shot at answering the questions we need to cover.

Here's a video I found on Youtube:


I'm already a member of Delicious with the username jcordi. You can check me out here: http://delicious.com/jcordi
Once joining, a plug in gets added to the browser being used, in my case FireFox which provides me with 3 buttons to use for tagging and adding bookmarks. A toolbar also gets added, but can be removed if desired. I like to keep it all there.
The first thing I did while opening up my old account was add more bookmarks that I thought were relevant to this assignment. I've added Twitter, Blogger, ResearchBuzz and TechCrunch there to he list of IKM sites I've added in the past. I included a note just to remind myself of what the site is, then added tags that would help me categorise these bookmarks if ever I do a search in future. What I found very useful was that there tags which the site recommends and those which are popular. I assume they are tags which other people used for the site. Very handy, unlike here on Blogger where making labels for the post has to come from the author of the blog himself.


The good thing about Social Bookmarking such as Delicious I guess is the social aspect. Being able to see what others are bookmarking with the numbers of people who've bookmarked sites can help in finding interesting new things that are out there. But if collaborating with others or if doing research, finding sites which people have added themselves might be more useful than doing a Google search! After tagging a site, it becomes shared with all the other users of Delicious who may benefit from the bookmark that was saved. This happens, unless of course the bookmark is chosen as private so that others cannot view it.
Another thing that I find a benefit of the program is being able to access your bookmarks on other computers than your own, as bookmarks are saved online, not on the PC.

In going through the settings, I discovered that it IS possible to import/upload to and from the browser and even export bookmarks to a PC. I have to be honest that I use bookmarks alot on my laptop and have gotten so used to it that I never would consider Delicious. But for research purposes, I think it would be a great place to save sites that I find on a uni PC that I could later access at home! I imported my Firefox bookmarks to Delicious was a quick and easy process. I went to Settings and selected Import/Upload bookmarks and made the selection of custom settings. I ensured I selected for my bookmarks to be private and only viewable by me and clicked the import button. It took roughly 2 minutes and sent me an email stating its completion. Tags were automatically given to the sites, most with an 'imported' tag included. That is so handy. Now all my bookmarks can be accessed and found in one place!

Now, if I went to a library or overseas on a holiday and wanted to access a site that I forgot the address for and couldn't be bothered searching for it on Google - it's all there on my Delicious bookmarks! That would be a further use for me and I would be confident in using it as it's an easy format to understand and access. I will try this for myself in the next few days at uni to experience the possibility of making Social Bookmarking a useful tool in my day to day internet and study life.

I'd love to hear what you guys have experienced / learnt from using delicious or any other social bookmarking tool...and any other features you've discovered that are useful?