Exercise 5

Before this class I had limited experience with using Delicious. I have an older account that I would occasionally save links to, but never even thought of tagging them in order to categorize and create some sense of order to them. This exercise was useful in getting me orientated with using tags, searching a tag to find similar links, and browsing another user’s bookmarks who has used similar tags.

When I saved my initial three bookmarks, I looked for articles and/or blog posts relating to the subject matter for this week. Two of the three bookmarks did not have any other people bookmarking it. The third link had six other people bookmarking it. As I continued to browse by tags, by one user’s name, and through the “bell246” tag for classmates’ links, I began to realize that the links with the most number of users’ bookmarks tended to be resources that users wanted to return to more than once. While I was following the weekly assignment of looking for related articles to bookmark (which I would probably only read once), many people are using Delicious to bookmark resources that they plan on using over and over, similar to using the bookmarks feature on the Firefox or Safari browsers. This explains why websites like MOG (3,567 bookmarks) and Dribbble (7,542 bookmarks) have so many bookmarks.

If only there was a way to transfer all of my Firefox and Safari bookmarks to Delicious in one fell swoop. Then I could access those bookmarks everywhere I go. Somehow I doubt there is. For now, I don’t really see myself using Delicious for extensive bookmarking like I do on Firefox. But for the occasional interesting article that I might come across at work and want to save for later reading, Delicious is a great tool.

And how about a Delicious app for the iPhone? I would certainly use it.