When most people think of bookmarking they think of just clicking that local bookmark button in whatever web browser they are using. Social Bookmarking is revolutionary concept. Instead of having your bookmarks saved to just your computer, they are accessible anywhere because they are saved to a website like Delicious. You can then tag your bookmarks and organize them by subject (or any other way you choose) and most importantly never have to worry about your computer crashing and loosing all of your bookmarks.
Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web wrote an article entitled R.I.P. Delicious: You Were So Beautiful to Me which discussed some of the other less obvious ways that social bookmarking sites like Delicious can be used. Among other uses Kirkpatrick mentioned using Delicious as a type of search engine. I really wish I had known about this concept before my last semester in college. Through the use of tags you can see what websites people have found that offer useful or interesting information about a given subject. I can imagine how useful this would be for writing papers and creating presentations.
I see Delicious as an incredibly useful website. I have already begun using it and definitely will continue to in the future. Kirkpatrick's article featured an update that reported that Yahoo! doesn't plan to close Delicious but to sell it. I can only hope this is true. Otherwise my new found love might be short lived.
Update (4/27): Delicious is safe!! Yahoo! announced today that the founders of YouTube Chad Hurley and Steven Chen have aquired Delicious. You can read more about the switch here
-M
Great post! I am torn on whether or not to create a Delicious account, because of this whole fiasco. I did make a Diigo, which seems to be working fine, but some of the features are not as interactive, and the organization is a little bit different (not too bad though). Since the option exists to simultaneously create both a Diigo and Delicious list of bookmarks, I might just do that. I definitely see social bookmarking as an amazingly-helpful invention. Until very recently, I was still "bookmarking" on Firefox, which, of course had many problems. Hopefully social bookmarking will help me keep my bookmarks more organized and readily available, whichever site I end up using.
ReplyDeleteI am in the same position. I see the benefits for using these websites like Stumble and Delicious because instead of going to find the information. The information can come to you in terms of relevancy, and popularity. Using these programs as a search engine seems to be the future of the web. I was hesitant at first to create an account, but for the past week information has come more organized and available. Also, agree that every college student should be required to take a class similar to ares to understand the severe concepts behind the new media managers.
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