delicious

Other Social Bookmarking Tools

Overview 

What Is It?

delicious (formerly 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 delicious, 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 delicious.

How Does It Work?

deliciousWhen you log in to delicious, you have access to a "post" form that can be used to add any URL of your choice to your personal list of bookmarks. delicious 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 delicious bookmarks. You have to provide a descriptive title for each link you add; if you use the provided Javascript widget, delicious 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 (tags) for each link and use these tags to organize your bookmarks in delicious.

You can use the keyword tags added by other delicious 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 delicious user.

delicious 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, or PUBPOL237) 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.

Subscribe to a tag

  • On your course website, embed an RSS feed (using Feed2JS is one way to do this) showing the latest bookmarks added with a particular tag, either a course-specific tag or a public tag.

Things to consider

  • Links added to delicious 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.

Last modified November 12, 2008 9:07:59 PM EST