Delicious

Time for something [|Del.icio.us]!

Delicious is a social bookmarking site. That may sound odd because usually bookmarks are something personal and linked to your browser. Firstly, Delicious allows you to store your bookmarks online instead of inside a browser. This makes your shortcuts available from any computer and from any browser! If you are always sitting at one computer then this may not sound like anything important, but if you have gone through a PC change or browser change you will have felt first hand what it is like losing your 'internet knowledge' of where things are.

The second important aspect of Delicious is that you can 'tag' the bookmark with a variety of keywords. This is similar to organising the bookmarks into directories, except that it is possible (and even encouraged) to put the bookmark into multiple directories. Doing so will aid in finding the exact bookmark in the future because it lets you remember the bookmark through different ways. For example you may want to bookmark a funny youTube video of a cat playing a piano as 'video', 'cat', 'piano', 'funny'. Now you can find this video by remembering that it was funny and searching for all bookmarks tagged as 'funny', or alternately be thinking that it involved a cat and find the video by searching for bookmarks tagged as 'cat'.

The third aspect stems from this tagging practice. If I am looking for funny bookmarks I can look through my own tags for 'funny', or I could look through everybody's public tags for 'funny'. Bookmarking and tagging sites not only helps you search for your own favourite sites, but helps others find interesting sites based on topic. You can even subscribe to a tag so that you are notified any time someone bookmarks a site with that specific tag. This allows the creation of loosely bound communities following the same topics of interest.

The ability for delicious to allow a community to form around a specific topic can be leveraged in a club environment like this, or even in a classroom. Any websites found that would be of interest to people in this club can be bookmarked with 2 tags '[|stlukes laptopclub]'. If there is specific information regarding a certain topic (such as [|'socialnetworking']), then those tags can be combined with '[|stlukes laptopclub]' to give a more [|refined list of interesting sites].

Here's a more group-centred approach: media type="custom" key="2369947"

Here's a way that I've used Delicious to build a 4 week unit for 12 IPT students to study the [|School's Internet Access]. They are doing it right now.

Here is a list of the last 20 delicious bookmarks tagged with 'stlukes laptopclub' rss url="http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/laptopclub+stlukes" link="true" number="20" date="true" author="true"