I love del.icio.us! It’s my favorite social bookmarking application (although I will confess I haven’t tried too many others since I like this one so much). You can find my del.icio.us account here and see how much I love it by all the tags and bookmarks. 🙂
Getting Started
It’s quite easy to set up an account and start bookmarking. Since del.icio.us is web-based, you can bookmark pages and see your bookmarks from any computer. You can also assign multiple tags to each bookmark and then organize your tags making it easy to find all the great recipe sites you’ve bookmarked – or whatever your interest is. You can also build a network of friends on del.icio.us to see what your friends are bookmarking. Since privacy can be an issue, del.icio.us offers a “do not share” checkbox beside each bookmark, so you can choose if there are ones you do not want to share.
Must Have Add-Ons
If you use Firefox, there are browser add-ons that make bookmarking much easier.
1) The del.icio.us buttons add-on simply adds a del.icio.us button and a TAG button in your browser navigation bar. You can bookmark any page as you find it by clicking the TAG button.
2) The Delicious Bookmarks add-on is an updated version of del.icio.us buttons, which also provides a sidebar that lets you browse and search your bookmarks easily.
You only need one of these – not both. My only issue with add-ons is that I have yet to find an add-on that lets you manage multiple del.icio.us account easily. I actually have a few accounts, and I want an add-on that lets me choose the account(s) when I add a bookmark. I know it would be hard to create, but I bet there’s a developer out there looking for a challenge. 😉
Blogging Settings
The blogging settings also offer some nice goodies. If you have a blog, you can include daily blog posts of the pages you have bookmarked in del.icio.us. Also, you can add a link roll to your blog (as I just did):
Del.icio.us for Georgia Libraries
I have a second account here that I set up as an example of how librarians may use a del.icio.us account at their library, particularly for a reference desk in Georgia. I have been experimenting with a ranking system for the subject category tags with the idea that a librarian could give a 1- to 5-start rating to a site based on how good it is for a particular subject. Like I said, it’s an experiment, and I may change it. Let me know what you think.
Learning about Libraries and Technology 