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April 16, 2007
Del.Icio.Us Summary
Last Thursday, I blogged about del.icio.us for my group's blog assignment. Here's the link to that entry: My group blog Del.Icio.Us Post. It details my experience with the social bookmarking site and why I found it very useful.Here are more thoughts on del.icio.us...
Over the past semester, I've posted on del.icio.us almost everyday, amassing over 140 bookmarks. The majority of them are information technology (IT) related, including articles about the latest news in IT. Even though I typically wouldn't bookmark IT websites for fun, the ones that I did bookmark will be very useful for me in the future, especially sites like webopedia.com, which has useful technology definitions, and The Bare Bones Guide to HTML, which lists every common HTML tag all onto one page.
Besides IT, I have a wide assortment of bookmarks that show my various interests, one of the main ones being entertainment news/gossip. In order to keep all these bookmarks organized and easy to find, I tagged extensively and created different Tag Bundles to group related tags. Therefore, if I'm in the mood to check out an entertainment site that I like, I just go to del.icio.us and look under my "Entertainment" bundle. If I need to do some researching for a project (which I did many times during this semester for my classes), I check out the links I have under my "Search,Tools,and Tips" bundle. Though I only currently have 9 bundles, I know I'm going to end up making more as my bookmark list expands because bundling really facilitates the del.icio.us search process.
At first, I relied heavily on the search engine, google,, to find IT websites to bookmark. Many of the sites I found were great sources for information technology news including techweb.com and infoworld.com. However, after a while, I needed to find another way to search for links because google returned the same search results every time. Thus, I turned to del.icio.us's hot list, located on the main page, where I found recent popular sites for the day (luckily, most of these are usually technology related). Occassionally I browsed people's del.icio.us accounts, including friends on my network, to see what IT links they had by clicking on tags related to IT such as "technology", "web", etc. However, the most effective method that I found for discovering interesting IT websites is going to digg.com every morning.
Digg is a place where digg users can post and share sites that they "digg" (aka find interesting) with other people. The sites with the most recent popular diggs are on the front page. Though not all sites are IT-related, I often found myself enjoying the browsing experience and checking out different kinds of websites that I would never have looked for before. More often than not, I'd find a link on digg that would eventually lead me to some piece of information technology news that I would post onto del.icio.us.
Overall, I enjoyed using del.icio.us and discovering its many benefits. It is a tool that I will continue to use outside of BIT 200 because it organizes and stores my bookmarks so well. I recommend it to anyone who loves to browse the net.
My del.icio.us account
Posted by paulinad at April 16, 2007 03:17 PM