After listening to everyone's favorable comments about Del.iciou.us, I have been looking forward to this lesson. I love to discover new 'tips & tricks' for organization.
I decided to search Del.icio.us for a particular counted cross stitch pattern for a floral ABC sampler that I remembered seeing in a magazine. I found that the search worked better if I used fewer words than I'm used to with a Google search. I also found that tags need to be one word and that I could find 'cross stitch' as either 'crossstitch' or 'cross-stitch' but also as 'crossstitching.' The 'Related Tags' list helped. Most of my searches sent me to personal or store blogs. One interesting search sent me to 'Free Cross Stitch Database' - a blog in Italian whose headings and tags were in English. (There was also a quirky music video in Italian on its front page, YouTube style, that had nothing to do with cross stitch.) I never did find what I was looking for. However, when I did the search on Google, I found exactly what I was looking for in both the third and fourth sites listed.
After setting up an account on del.icio.us, I imported my list of favorites and started to add my own tags. (Having over 400 bookmarks in my favorites, it's going to take me a long time to complete the tagging process. Right now it's easier to find them in the folder system that I already have set up.) I placed a button for Delicious on my browser toolbar and edited it so that it wouldn't take up so much space. I tried to add a link to my del.icio.us account on my blog but could not get it to work. (I got responses that said "broken" or "contains illegal characters.") I guess I'll need to talk with one of our techs about what I might be doing wrong.
I think that this could be a great tool for anyone who uses more than one computer. Librarians, students, travelers...anyone needing access to previous researched and bookmarked websites would enjoy this flexibility. Unfortunately, my search in Del.icio.us did not save me time or yield better results than my Google search. This was a disappointment. (Maybe I'm just more familiar with Google and would need more experience with Del.icio.us.) I do feel that the tagging system could be a good substitute for the file card system of research - at least for online resources.
Now, back to that tagging...and many, many more cups of tea!
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I'm still unsure of what this one really does for you. Is it another search engine like google that allows bookmarking? Sounds like you did a lot of work here.
ReplyDeleteJock, even though the lesson asked us to "search del.icio.us for something you're interested in," Del.icio.us is really not a search engine. It does, however, give you the ability to access your bookmarks from any computer. (Google also provides this service, now.) Del.icio.us' claim to fame is their 'social bookmarking' set-up - the open sharing of your bookmarks with other users, as well as being able to access those other users' bookmarks. After some experience with this site, you might find people whose bookmarks you find particularly useful. I could see that librarians, and other researchers, might be heavy users of these social bookmarking sites - del.iciou.us, digg, Ma.gnolia, Reddit, Simpy, Stumble Upon. In that case, I guess they are piggy-backing on each others prior searches via search engines.
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