Wish all your bookmarks/favorites from all your computers could be in one place?

                Now there’s a way to keep all your bookmark/favorite websites together in one place, accessible from your home computer, your school computer, your brother-in-law’s computer up at the lake – any computer with internet access.  There are other handy features, too, but more about those later.

                Del.icio.us (at www.Del.icio.us) is a free website for keeping all those links you are trying to keep track of in one place. 

                To see how it works, click here:

 

                Is this easy?  Yes.  First, to go www.del.icio.us and register.  You’ll need to create a userid and password.  I have a lot of websites like this that I use, so I use the same userid and password on all of them so that I can remember them.  You’ll also need to give a real email (useful when you forget your password.)

                Then follow the instructions to install on your computer.  Do it at home first.  Then do it at school (I have to confess I had a few problems installing it at school, too, but in the end, it did work.)  Unfortunately, I can’t walk you through this, since it’s already installed on all my computers!  But it’s pretty easy.

                Finally, sign in and start tagging websites you like.  Tagging, as you’ll recall from the video, is very important.  When you find a website you like, click on the Tag button that’s now on your browser.  You’ll see a dialog that includes a place to write notes about the website, if you like, and a place for tags.  Tags are what help you find that website again when you have 400+ websites in your Delicious files.  Instead of having to create folders and drag websites into them, as you had to with Bookmarks/Favorites, you just add tags.  Tags are keywords that you can search on.  

Some important points about tags.  First, you can have lots of tags for a bookmark, so include everything that you might think of.  Second, be specific.  “Teaching” may be a tad generic and relate to just about everything.  We’re looking for distinguishing features. Third, you can just click on the suggested tags given, or you can type them in yourself.  And fourth:  no spaces between words in Delicious – professional development is two tags, so if you want it as one idea, run the words together like this: professionaldevelopment.  Then when you want to find that, scroll through your alphabetized keywords and click on the keyword you want.  Then just the bookmarks associated with that keyword will pop up. (Don’t worry, the rest of them are still there.  Just click on Bookmarks up at the top, and they’ll all reappear.) 

                Now comes the social part of social bookmarking.  Recently, I wanted to teach a lesson on parody and was looking for good examples to show students.  I searched on “parody” in the search box at the top right in Del.icio.us.  This gave me bookmarks that other people had tagged with “parody.”  It even told me how many people had tagged each website.  While some were wildly inappropriate, I found several terrific sources that would have been buried somewhere deep in a Google search that I wouldn’t have found. 

                If you want to keep a bookmark private – not available to others who are searching on the tag you used – click on “do not share” when you create the bookmark (or when you edit the bookmark later).

                I have not yet bothered to delve deeper into the social aspects of Delicious, because what I have is working just fine for me.  But you may discover additional features – please share with us so we can all benefit from your experience.

                If you are having trouble installing Del.icio.us at school, let me know and I’ll come help you out.

Best,

Fran