Tag-a-licious

I've been using del.icio.us for a while now. I have had some successes and failures with each of the following six items. I'm was looking for a few good people to discuss common tags with an eye to promoting social bookmarking to others; specifically those in education. By the end of my work today, I've decided that maybe that's really not necessary. I found an interesting screencast by Jon Udell that gave me new insight into maneuvering through delicious.

Here are the six things I do with delicious. I can:

1. open up any computer and have my bookmarked sites available
2. categorize them for ease of finding later on
3. bundle the categories in a logical manner
4. share the sites with friends/ colleagues
5. see what others have found by making a network of delicious users with the same interests
6. search delicious
   

Open any computer and have my bookmarked sites available
This is the most direct reason for using del.icio.us. There are other bookmarking systems out there. Just type bookmarks online into Google and you'll get 11.6 million results today. Delicious rarely fails me. It's always up and running when I need it and I can tell it to store my bookmarks on my local machine when I sign out.

Categorize them for ease of finding later on
This is a touchy subject for anyone who bookmarks a web site. Touchy because, by its nature, if you are storing a lot of information ease depends on how good your filing system is. I have a category for Flickr and all its related components. Anytime I want something in Flickr or a site related to it, I can always find what I'm looking for. Since I've starting using delicious, I haven't always been consistent with my categories so I don't always quickly find what I'm looking for. For example, I was looking for this Google video about what information Google stores on its users in the middle of class and I didn't find it. I had it filed in computer_videos, but should have cross filed it in under Google.

Bundle categories in a logical manner
This does work beautifully when I take the time to bundle new categories. My husband is as technologically literate as I am (even more so when it comes to hardware). He took to the idea of delicious and set up an account for his consultants in India. He didn't get the idea of bundles and tags. It took some explaining and I'm looking for a good analogy. I said bundles are like chapters in a book or big folders inside a filing cabinet. I probably should have liken them to folders in a hard drive. I have 128 tags that are unbundled. These are the things I'd like to bundle before vacation is over.

Share sites with friends and colleagues
This works well between my husband and I. It works well between my personal delicious account and the one I set up for the school. All I have to do is type for:saintmichael and when I sign on with the school account, all I have to do is go to the links for you tab and save the bookmark to the appropriate tag.

See what others have found by making a network of delicious users with the same interests
This is another seriously worthwhile addition to my ability to learn new things. I don't always look at the your network tab, but when I do I often find one or two really worthwhile links that I want to refer back to or add to my tagged items. It's really helpful when I look at the links and see what other people choose to add as notes to the bookmarks they save. This is something I want to promote when I talk to other teachers.

Search delicious
Rather than going to Google as a first place to look, I'm trying to train myself to search delicious first. I can search your bookmarks, del.icio.us, or the web. My thought is that other people sought out information and found these sites useful. Why not cut to the chase and look here first?

If you're looking for a "how to" article on delicious, check out EdCompBlog: Show me, don't tell me. It was written way back in July 2005.