Monday, May 24, 2010

Delicious? Yes it is.

Simply put, social bookmarking is a way for people to share their internet links with others. Not so simply put, social bookmarking is a method for people to share, search, organize and manage not only their bookmarks, but the bookmarks of colleagues or members of their PLN.
Delicious is probably the most famous social bookmarking site and it is the one I will profile today. If you haven't heard of delicious, sign up for an account NOW!

On a basic level, Delicious is great for saving your own personal bookmarks. You can import bookmarks you've already saved on your computer to your delicious account easily.You can also add a handy delicious tool to your browser that will enable you to save websites to your delicious account with one click (I would highly recommend this). You have the option to keep your bookmarks private or public so that everyone can find the sites you feel are valuable.

One important thing to understand when bookmarking sites on delicious are tags. Tags are the most essential aspect of delicious as they will help you organize and search through your bookmarks. When adding a website to your delicious account, delicious will actually provide you with some suggested tags for that page based on words others have used to categorize that website. For an example, here is a link to my delicious account with all of the websites I have tagged as Web 2.0: http://delicious/andy.cunningham/web2.0. You can further refine your search by combining two or more tags: http://delicious.com/andy.cunningham/web2.0+presentation.

As I said, social bookmarking can be a very effective tool for a PLN. Not only can you direct people to your public delicious page you can also follow other people to see which sites they have identified as being important. Simply search for a user and add them to your network. You can browse through your Network's delicious bookmarks and keep up to date with new sites they've added. This could be very effective for a PLC group as people could simply add sites to their delicious account for others in the group to search through.

For those of you who would prefer this transcript in video, watch this:

2 comments:

  1. Great overview Andy! I myself recently happened upon Delicious, and I can't imagine how I functioned before it! Thanks for sharing this overview with your PLN :)

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  2. Yes, Delicious and Twitter are probably the most efficient and effective methods to get out information and weblinks.

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