If you ever wished that the websites that you bookmark could be available to you wherever you connect to the web, then the Delicious service is just what you need. Once you sign up for an account you can copy web addresses (URLs) from websites you’d like to save, and paste them into the Delicious “Save a new bookmark” form. Additionally, you can tag those saved bookmarks with keywords to help you keep them organized. The social angle of the website happens as other people you know obtain a Delicious account. You can see what others in your network have bookmarked, and you can save bookmarks for other people in your network. In essence you are sending a recommendation of a website for your friends, family, or colleagues to take a look at. When you return to the Delicious site, any bookmarks that have been recommended to you by your network, will be in your Delicious Inbox.
Another powerful feature that is built into the Delicious service is RSS feeds by tag. So let’s say that you tag some bookmarked sites with “education”, the links to those sites can be re-published as a dynamic feed on another website. If you wanted to get really specific, you could have students in a class tag their bookmarks with something like “umweduc220s09″ for the Spring 2009 Education 220 class at UMW. Students in that class could thereby share those found resources with each other.
Delicious not only let’s you save website bookmarks, but you can also save links to media files as well. If you save a bookmark to a media files such as an .mp3, Delicious will provide a small player program for you to listen to the media file. Delicious also provides some tools that you can use to help you manage and save your bookmarks easily through the use of some tools. The Delicious Bookmark tool for Firefox is a great example of a way within the Firefox browser to search and manage your saved bookmarks. It will even keep track of your most visited bookmarks so you have quick links to those most often used resources and websites. There is also a Delicious Bookmark tool for Internet Explorer. Though we do recommend Firefox for lots of reasons. The Delicious service can be as simple as an online bookmark site, or as fancy as a creating a personal podcast using the tools and techniques described above.
