Delicious.com is a social bookmarking application that allows users to save, tag, and share bookmarks. After users create an account on Delicious.com, they can tag and categorize links to websites for easy search and retrieval. Users can control the privacy of their bookmarks; most often their links will be public, but they can be marked private or only shared with specific groups.
In addition to providing users with the ability to access and edit their bookmarks from any computer connected to the Internet, users can also search or view other users’ bookmarks.
To make managing bookmarks easier, Delicious has plug-ins for Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 and similar integrations for other types of browser. Delicious also has an application that integrates with a user’s Facebook.com profile.
How I Use It:
As I began doing research for graduate classes, I would come across websites and blog posts that I knew I would want to use some time in the future. I began bookmarking these random websites on my PC and laptop. Later I would try to make sense of my random assortment of browser bookmarks and it was incredibly frustrating. I knew that I had to find a better way to catalog my findings.
I learned what Delicious.com was and how to use it by observing classmates and instructors in previous classes cataloging their links. I was able to view my classmates’ Delicious.com tags and taxonomies. I could also view the resources they had identified and add them to my own profile if so desired. It for these reasons that I view Delicious.com as a tool that supports social cognitive theory; I learned it by watching those around me succeed with it and I continue to observe user trends to streamline my usage.
When I search the Delicious.com website, I am searching the tags and websites of other users who have similar interests. Often times searches on Delicious.com prove more fruitful than Google searches because I am searching a directory created by my peers.
With Delicious.com, I am able to construct my own taxonomy of links as well as continuously add to it by viewing the tags and sites of those around me. To some extent, discovering Delicious.com changed how I manage the Internet, which speaks volumes of its worth as a tool.
