del.icio.us

Other Social Bookmarking Tools

Overview

What Is It?

del.icio.us is an online bookmark manager, otherwise known as a "social bookmarking" site. Registered users can add sites to their personal collection of links and share those links with others. Sites you add can be categorized with keywords or "tags", enabling you to search for and group similar links together. With del.icio.us, you can also see the links that other users have collected and "tagged" with a specific word or term or find others who have bookmarked a specific site.

Examples

See a set of links recently added to del.icio.us.

How Does It Work?

delicious When you log in to del.icio.us, you have access to a "post" form that can be used to add any URL of your choice to your personal list of bookmarks. del.icio.us also provides a Javascript widget that you can add to your browser's tool bar to easily add the URL of any page you are viewing to your collection of del.icio.us bookmarks. You have to provide a descriptive title for each link you add; if you use the provided Javascript widget, del.icio.us fills in the description field for you based on the title of the page you are viewing. You can also provide a list of keywords for each link and use these tags to organize your bookmarks in del.icio.us.

You can use the keyword tags added by other del.icio.us users to their collections of bookmarks to search for links that might be of interest to you. You can also view the list of bookmarks entered by any other del.icio.us user.

del.icio.us provides a variety of RSS feeds, enabling you to subscribe to your own list of bookmarks, all bookmarks having a particular keyword tag or all bookmarks entered by a specific user.

Uses as an Instructional Technology

Share a group of links with students

Create a collection of links tagged with a specific keyword (e.g. foreign_policy) and share those links with your students.

Students can find and share resources on specific topics

Create a course login/account and share it with the class. Direct the class to add links relevant to specific tags, perhaps prepared ahead of time by the faculty member. Though many links will be less than scholarly, some may reveal surprising information that could prove useful and timely to the course.

Things to consider

Links added to del.icio.us are "public" by default. Be careful to keep links "private" if you don't want to share specific links.
Everyone has a different way of "tagging". One person may tag a site as "economics", while another may tag the same site as "money" or "statistics". Remind students to be careful to create consistent tags and to check spelling when tagging.

Additional Information

Brief Educause article "7 Things You Should Know About...Social Bookmarking"

Instructions for installing del.icio.us as your main bookmarking tool in Firefox

Video explaining social bookmarking in plain English