Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Confessions of a del.icio.us Addict

In recent weeks, I've become increasingly enamored of the social network and bookmarking service known as del.icio.us. I set an account up nearly 2 years ago now, but largely used it as online bookmark storage. Gradually, through several friends (online and off) I became aware of its other features. Caleb McDaniel (formerly of Mode for Caleb) demonstrated the numerous tagging capabilities through a couple of emails and conversations. [Looking at my own del.icio.us account (del.icio.us/kurastan90) you can see that my earliest del.icio.us links are not tagged, or if they are, the tags were added later.] Yet, even with the new tagging making my bookmarks more accessible to me, I was still using it as an amped-up version of my own bookmarks in IE or Firefox. It was Martha who alerted me to the use of a network and "for:" tags in del.icio.us in this post. [For the uninitiated, del.icio.us allows users to add other users to their network, allowing you to see the sites they're tagging. The "for:" tag allows you to send particular users in your network particular sites in which you think they may be interested.] I began to add various people to my network (first DTLT members, then people from CHNM, and soon others) and realized how many cool sites I had been missing. As I pored over their various sites, I began to mark particular sites for them, and slowly they began to tag them for me as well.

I have managed to convert other colleagues to del.icio.us, and they too have become addicted to the ease, the social bookmarking, the tagging, and the sharing of good sites. At this point, if I run across a link I that I think someone might want, and that person is not in my network, I'm actually a little annoyed. I think about how much easier it would be if I could just add the "for:" tag and they would be able to see it.

I realized recently that I have created a network of people I know (to varying degrees) who scour the internet for me (and I for them). Although we have overlapping interests and therefore look at some of the same sites, we're different enough that they run across resources I don't and vice versa. In this chaotic, information-saturated online world, having a few (or 14) expert researchers sharing the best (or maybe just fun) resources can prove an incredible boon.

Now, to figure out how to add this to my goals for digital literacy and to my classes this fall. More to come....

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jeff,

I have been getting a ton of great links from you as of late. I was playing with the automatic del.icio.us blog feature that packages your daily links (description & tags as well) into a post on your blog. yet another layer of networking around resources. What is also great about flickr is that your network has an rss feed, so you can always be made aware of their latest bookmarks -del.icio.us is really impressive, relatively simple to use, no-frills, powerful, and it just works.

Anonymous said...

Substitute del.icio.us for flickr in that comment, as you can see - I am beginning to conflate my Web 2.0 toys.

Anonymous said...

I'll admit I have been secretly reading what professors tag on their del.icio.us accounts for awhile now.
So, if you could find a way to work del.icio.us into your classes that would be awesome, I could actually put my account to good use, assuming I was in one of your classes : )
Also that way I can stop being so creepy, I really feel like I am stalking waaay too many professors.

Alexandra said...

I have a delicious account for I don't know how long but never really used it all that much. I've started exploring it more recently and I'm getting really excited about the many uses one can make of it.