Here is a great video about social bookmarking. One of the buttons below each post is a del.icio.us button. I could not live without delicious. One of the best things about it is that your bookmarks are not tied to one computer. You can access them from any computer using a browser and you can share them or make them public. This video does any excellent job explaining how it works in a funny and fast paced way. Visit Common Craft’s website to see more videos about technology “in plain English”.
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At first glance it seems really cool. But then you notice that you have to add it to each computer browser on each computer, so what’s different than just importing the bookmarks to each computer? They suggest “tags” to organize your chosen websites. That seems an awful lot like making folders in your browser. Finally, suppose you have websites that you don’t want to share with the rest of the world? I didn’t see any mention that one could choose which websites are made publicly available.
I don’t use it like that. I can log into my account from any computer to access my bookmarks. Say I am at a friends house and I want to shwo them something online. I know I bookmarked it with delicious. I go to del.icio.us and log in and I can search my categories or tags. It also helped me when i was traveling and realized I had a bill to pay. I pay all my bills online so I was able to go directly to the bill pay site, which by the way has many letters and numbers and is not in any way recognizable.
I have also collaborated with other teachers. We made a category for teaching technology and we all agreed to add 2 bookmarks a week and then by the end of the month we had many useful sites we could all access.
I also made an account for a school where I worked. I saved all the teacher websites, useful student websites, sites where I wanted them to visit, etc. Students were able to log in from home and see all the links.
I am pretty sure that after you tag a site you can choose to not make that one public if you would like.
Tagging is much quicker than folders. It also organizes the info better. I can put a link into 6 categories in the time it takes to add it to one folder. Sometimes I might tag a site that I want to label blog, travel, bicycles, toulouse. I can do that in about 4 seconds. Then when I look into each of those tags that same site appears.
I know sometimes things like this sound like they can’t save time or aren’t useful but this is one that is very useful. It has a very clever address, that alone should make you use it. del.icio.us, not delicious.com, although delicious.com redirects there.
I decided to try it out and yes Bob you can decide which tags you want to make public. You can also set up an includes list or an excludes list, if you know the user name, so not everyone can view your lists. You just have to enable private link saving and all is well. Really try it out.
I guess I’m going to have to give it a go then.
Of course you don’t have to. I was thinking that you can also set it up to not share your bookmarks with anyone. If you just want to have your bookmarks accessible from any computer and don’t care about the sharing part you can make them all private. Only you can log in and access them.