What’s Delicious?
Delicious makes it easy for you to have a single set of portable bookmarks which can be accessed elsewhere through the internet. More than that, it’s a social bookmarking service so you can tag, save, organize, search and share bookmarks through the web. Like what so-and-so is posting on the art of bread? You can view more of so-and-so’s links and learn as much as you want on bread as your heart desires.
The main strengths of this bookmarking? It greatly improves how people discover, remember and share information on topics that they are most interested in.
For a basic understanding of its capacities, have a look at this clip.
My links are nicely organized in my folders. I know what they’re about. Why tag them?
I asked this question myself, not warming up to the concept at first. Then I thought of the tagging feature more. Think of it. You have a load of links to helpful / favourite websites in your folder called, oh I don’t know … let’s say “Pastries”. You like pastries … making them, eating them, and talking about them to get more ideas for making them and good places to buy them. You soon have 20 links in the folder. As you put them in you know what they’re all about and are confident you can jog your memory quickly as to what you’d find if you went with the first link, or perhaps even the 12th, or the 20th. A few weeks go by in which you’re immersed in a mind-bending physics report and have got a new job leaving you with little sleep let alone enough time to study … it’s Sunday today and you can’t remember which link had the info on the place with the good deals on éclairs only over the weekend .
With delicious tagging, you give that link the tag “éclair discounts” and “weekends” and voila. Bon appétit.
Point being, with tagging a bookmark you can save time and drama over pastries in your life by seeing the website and corresponding tags describing its contents right away. No rummaging through all 20 links to find some particular obscure information you really need for a paper. Or for a hunger craving.
Getting A Delicious Account and Using its Basics
1. Getting an Account
Go to delicious.com to apply a delicious account by clicking the upper right Join Now!
Step 1: Enter Details
Step 2: Add Buttons
Step 3: Import Existing Bookmarks
Step 1 is mandatory for the registration, Step 2 and 3 can be skipped and completed later. However, in order to save and tag bookmarks delicious bookmark buttons are necessary.
If you want to add links to Delicious directly on a browser (rather than copying and pasting the a site’s URL into your Delicious account), don’t forget to select the “Add on ” feature.
a. To install Firefox Add-on, go to http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/firefox
b. To install Internet Explorer Add-on, go to http://delicious.com/help/quicktour/ie
c. To install Bookmarklet to browsers, go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets, Bookmarklet Buttons can be installed to Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer 6 and 7, Chrome and Opera bookmark toolbar by drag and drop links.
2. Tagging and saving
a. Select to tag, add Notes, send the bookmark to your network user/users and share the bookmark in public or keep it private. Then click the Save button to save the bookmark to your account.
b. Users with Bookmarklet Buttons, click Bookmark on Delicious and do the same as above.
3. Adding users to your network
a. Click People menu, and then click in the upper right corner to add a user to your network.
b. Users can also click Settings in the upper right corner and then click Edit Network to add or remove users from their networks.
4. Subscribing to tags that interest you
a. Under Tags which you’d seen in the submenu
click from the upper right corner to add your favorite tags.
b. Users can also click Settings in the upper right corner and then click Edit Subscriptions to add/edit subscriptions.
5. Mashup with other tools
- Linkrolls to display a list of your recent Delicious bookmarks as part of your website.
- Tagrolls to display a cloud or list of your Delicious tags as part of your website.
- Network Badges to show your readers that you are a member of Delicious and give them an easy way to add you to their network.
- Blog Posting to Experimental feature that can automatically post entries to your blog every day containing your latest links.
- Facebook Application to enhance your Facebook account with content and notifications from your bookmarks
These are the basics … once you get going you’ll discover quite a few nifty features. That said, you may also want to check out Pinboard, another similar tool. It’s less busy and text heavy but at the moment, the thought of paying for it isn’t convincing me to make the leap.