Social
Bookmarks
click here to register for
new "social bookmarks" (del.icio.us)
click here for documentation
What is a "Social
Bookmark"
» del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you
to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links,
to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection
not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with
others.
What are the features:
» You can access your list of links from any web browser.
By default, your links are shown to you in reverse chronological
order, with those you've added most recently at the top. In addition
to viewing by date, you can also view all links in a specific
category (you define your own categories as you add the links),
or search your links for keywords.
» What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability
to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as
showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also
view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links
of people whose lists you find interesting.
What is delicious/popular:
These are the most popular links by the internet users or community
using del.icio.us - click
here for popular.
What is the theory behind del.icio.us and social bookmarks
(exercepted from the following URL: http://ideant.typepad.com/ideant/2004/12/a_delicious_stu.html)
We have definitely arrived at a point in the development of human
knowledge where the amount of content published online everyday
far exceeds the ability of anyone to categorize and index such
wealth of information. Even for a hypothetical individual or organization
of great skill and capacity, the task of processing all that content
would pose an almost insurmountable problem, without even considering
the difficulty of developing and maintaining a taxonomy to accommodate
the speed at which new knowledge is produced.
But the situation is not
hopeless. Solutions to this particular dilemma are emerging that
are in accordance to the demands of the Information Age. One approach,
made possible by advances in network technologies, is to distribute
the task amongst the maximum number of individuals possible. Just
as we figured out that scanning outer space for intelligent life
signals is a task that can proceed more efficiently by being distributed
across many computer processors, we have begun to realize that
other tasks that require human involvement can also be distributed
across individuals by using the largest human network in history:
the internet.
This principle of distribution
is at work in socio-technical systems that allow users to collaboratively
organize a shared set of resources by assigning classifiers, or
tags, to each item. The practice is coming to be known as free
tagging, open tagging, ethnoclassification, folksonomy, or faceted
hierarchy (henceforth referred to in this study as distributed
classification), and is associated with popular online services
such as furl (www.furl.net), del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/),
or flickr (www.flickr.com/).
How can I use it:
Well in our Paralegal Program, see how we use it - click
here. I think it will have a multitude of applications. First,
it allows you to travel with your bookmarks from computer to computer.
Remember to not use it for 'personal bookmarks' i.e. bank accounts,
etc. that you should leave on your home computers. This program
will help you collect useful websites both for your own use and
for your students. It aggregrates them into categories, and that
is a powerful thing, to be able to 'tag; different categories.
Also if you want to find out about others on particular categories,
then go to :http://del.icio.us/tag/name of category, for instance
here are tags on math, http://del.icio.us/tag/math.
Pretty neat, hey? What is neat about this, is then you can check
out the tags or categories of persons who have their own social
bookmarks, and you will see one mathematician likes "Godel"
- so he has a "Godel Category" - click here http://del.icio.us/tag/godel
and you can check that out. So there seems to be a real live 'synergy'
or "community of interests" which develop here amongst
users of the program. I remember when "Google" came
out and I thought "Wow". Well when I saw the applications
with this program, it was another one of those "Wow"
moments. Hope you like it as much as I do.
How do I start using it:
1. First register - click
here. You will type in your unique 'username' password, full
name, and email address. Once you are registered you will receive
an email with a link, and click on that link to verify your email
address, and that it is you who is setting up the account.
2. You can read the documentation on the program, but it is pretty
sparse at this time - click
here.
3. When you register you will get more information which will
include the link 'my del.icio.us' and 'post del.icio.us"
4. What you do with these links is click on it with your pointer,
hold down the pointer, and drag the link, you will see a small
box and drop that small box, or put the pointer on the bar at
the top of your browser, that is your toolbar. That will place
both of these on your toolbar.
5. Then you can click on 'my delicious' and it will open your
bookmark page.
6. To place a web page or URL into your bookmark, go to the webpage
you wish to place into your bookmark, click on the tool bar above
in your browser on 'post", and it will open a box, and on
the line it will have filled in the webpage address, then it has
a line "description" and that is usually already filled
in with some information about the page, then a line "extended"
and that is where you type in any additional information (optional)
you want to place about the webpage to remember it, and then "tag"
line, this is where you type in which category you want to store
it under. Once you have named the tag, it will automatically file
it there if you have established the tag before, or if not it
will open up a new tag or category.
Hope this helps.
Good luck, and enjoy your del.icio.us
David Jordan
Staff Development Chair
3/28/05
DJ