Thing 12 - delicious.com
Friday, November 14th, 2008Thing 12: Social Book-marking & del.icio.us
What is it?
The “book-marking” part of social book-marking is the online equivalent of the ‘favourites’ list (of websites etc) that you manage from the browser on your own computer. The “social” part of social book-marking is the way you can share with others and search what they have saved. Del.icio.us is one of many social book-marking services.
If you’d like to see what a del.icio.us account looks like you can go to 23katethings
You can watch this introductory video (+ some other much more complicated things to do with del.icio.us)
One attraction to using del.icio.us, rather than ‘favourites’, is that your delicious account can be accessed from any computer, but more interestingly …
- you can add your own ‘tags’ – categories or terms (aka keywords) that mean something to you; one website can have any number of tags
- you can then organise your tags into ‘tag bundles’ – giving you groups of sites that have something(s) in common – depending on its tags a site can appear in more than one bundle
- you can keep your bookmarks private – although you will be able to see all of them, those that have a padlock symbol cannot be seen by anyone else
- you can create a network with other people who may have similar, or disparate, interests (membership of a network can be kept private)
and lots more
WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO BEFORE YOU CAN TICK OFF THING 12:
1st register for an account at http://delicious.com – click on ‘join now’ and follow the 3 steps
- at Step 1 you will select your username and fill in the form
- at Step 2 you will be asked if you want to ‘add firefox extension’ – I recommend that you accept this – it only involves a very quick automatic closedown and restart of firefox – then you have the del.icio.us book-marking tools available on your toolbar; or you can add the button to your toolbar later on by clicking and dragging the delicious icon from the address bar of your own account
- at Step 3 you can import any existing bookmarks from, for instance, your ‘favourites’
*if you want to do this step at one of the workshop sessions you will need to remote desktop - please ask Aaron if you don’t know how to do this already*
Only you will be able to see your imported bookmarks when they are first transferred to del.icio.us. You can edit each entry - deciding how you want to tag it, and which, if any, you want to keep private. Although you will be able to see all of your bookmarks, those that have a padlock symbol cannot be seen by anyone else, even members of your network.
2nd add 3 or 4 websites to your account
There are several ways to do this:
- right click in the page and select ‘bookmark this page in delicious’ – this doesn’t work from every page, but does in the blog All the Modern Things
or
- use the del.icio.us button on your toolbar (either the one that appeared if you selected the firefox extension when you were registering, or one you installed yourself)
or
- in a newspaper article, for instance, scroll down to ‘share this item’ options e.g. at http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24611771-12377,00.html – and click on the del.icio.us symbol
or
- copy the url of the page you want to save, go to your del.icio.us account and select ‘save a new bookmark’, and paste in the url
Don’t forget to tag your selections.
Consider creating some tag bundles and a tag cloud – select ‘tag options’ from the pale blue menu to the right hand side of the page – embed the cloud in your thing12 blog post.
3rd add 23katethings to your network
- go to the ‘people’ drop down menu on your del.icio.us home page
- select ‘add a user to Network’ in the pale blue menu
- type in the username < 23katethings > and click on ‘Add’
4th blog it!
