Why I Use Delicious.com

Earlier today I made a brief presentation on a few web2.0 tools, including the social bookmarking tool delicious.com.  There are several reasons why I've been using delicious.com, first for personal use then for professional use, since April 2006.  Let me show you a few of the features that make Delicious useful to me.

First, as seen in the picture below, delicious uses a simple and aesthetically pleasing presentation of your bookmarks.  The screen isn't cluttered and the shades of blue and gray make it easy to look at (yes, I actually care about this stuff.  I'm a Mac).  When you first open your delicious page your bookmarks are arranged chronologically with most recently added bookmarks at the top.  You can sort your bookmarks in various ways that I'll explain later.  As you look at the screen below, notice the bar between my address bar and my tabs.  This is a Firefox add-on that displays my most visited delicious bookmarks, making it easy for me to navigate to the websites I use most often.

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When I find a new website that I find useful, I'm able to bookmark it in delicious by clicking on the "Tag" button to the left of my address bar (yes, this is also a Firefox add-on - it also may be available on Google Chrome).  This opens a new window which allows me to add tags to my new bookmark.  Tags are descriptors that will help me to find this bookmark again in the future.  In this case, I've navigated to the White House webpage and I've tagged this new bookmark with the tags "government", "politics", "president", "whitehouse", "apgov", and "apgovch12".  The last two tags help me connect a class and unit label to my bookmark.  Delicious will even suggest tags for me to use.

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Tags are especially useful because I won't have to remember what folder I've saved my bookmark to, I can just look it up by its tag.  Below, you can see all of the tags I've used in delicious.  The larger ones are the tags I've used most often.  By clicking on one of the tags listed I'll be able to see all of the websites I applied that tag to.

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If I click on my "Congress" tag, I've now pulled up all websites that I thought related to Congress.  This is great for users who often remember a website that they once used, but can't remember the name of it.  All I have to do is remember what the website was about, click on that tag, and find the website on that list of bookmarks.

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Finally, I can share my bookmarks with my colleagues and they can share their bookmarks with me.  All we have to do is add each other to our network.  As you can see below, I've already added several W-L teachers to my network and I can see what Sandy and Paul have bookmarked recently.  I'd especially like to see what some of my social studies colleagues are bookmarking, so I'll try to encourage them to use delicious.com, too.

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Besides just exploring my network, I can see what all delicious.com users are tagging.  For example, I'm curious what websites have been popular with people interested in the Supreme Court.  I've got a unit on the court system coming up and I'm looking to see what websites people have found worthy of bookmarking.  All I need to do is use the search box and type in "Supreme Court".  As you can see below, delicious suggest some ways to improve my search and then lists popular tagged websites below.  I'll probably find some sites that would be helpful when I teach the judiciary unit!

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Delicious's integration with Firefox and its use of tagging makes it a perfect web2.0 tool for an organizationally-challenged teacher like myself.  If you'd like any help setting up your own account, I'm happy to help!