Delicious - As good as it sounds!

Learning experience one (1):

Delicious is a great social networking tool for bookmarking anything online from websites of general interest to tools for professional development. What makes it social is the ability to network with other users and share your bookmarks by adding others to your network, becoming a fan off another user, sharing you new bookmarks through your twitter account, email and RSS. This essentially builds an online community and opportunity for collaboration through the sharing of bookmarked resources through the inbox feature provided and tagging.

I found one of the most functional features of delicious is the ability to access your bookmarks regardless of your physical or geographical location or the computer you are using. In addition to this you can save bookmarks anywhere, anytime not matter what sort of device you are using.

I believe the downloadable delicious tool bar to be the key to successful and continuous use of delicious. Without the tool bar bookmarking and tagging an item becomes a much longer process where a user must visit the delicious page, login to their account, click ‘save a new bookmark’, cut and paste the URL, enter a title, followed by tagging. Most users who are bookmarking an item want to do it quick and fast, the tool bar allow a quick one to two step process for easy bookmarking.

Delicious offers many useful functions, such as:

• Search (Bookmarks and users) including advanced search options.
• Tag clouds to help build collections.
• Display options such as opening a bookmark in a new window.
• Refining/display tools such as date, alphabetical, bookmarks per page.

For libraries the ability to bookmark in a central location could be priceless. Delicious may provide a platform for Information and reader services librarians to collaborate online information resource and services to minimise the time spent searching the internet to answer the same question twice. This may be on a localised level of collaborating and sharing within an organisation or even on a global scale.

Smaller organisations may choose to create accounts for focus group such as family history, children’s services or even current events and hot topics. From here these resources could be made available on a library website to allow patrons to access the resources themselves.

It's all food for thought!