Week Three: Social Bookmarking

First off: My apologies for the broken link. I did follow the text in the book but the format didn't seem to work. If you follow the changes below you should be fine.

This was a really interesting tool to discover through this class. I am surprised it's not being talked about like Twitter is these days, maybe in time.

I started by signing up for an account which was pain free, just a username and password. Then I started to fumble around the site. Only issue: my computer didn't recognize "del.icio.us" like in the text, but had no issue with http://delicious.com/

After signing in,the account took my bookmarks (existing) and put them into the account. I'm not sure if I like that now I reflect back. It may have created lots of work for me. All the links appear without tags. I then started clicking "edit" for each, trying to group them together and label with common tags. This is a handy feature.

Next I tried to make groups for the tags and this is fairly easy, just click on settings, and edit tag groups. Follow the steps and it does it all for you! I liked that - they are visible on the right hand side of my delicious.com/slockie screen.

After playing around with those functions I tried to search for a topic to see what would happen. I put in "Wind" and got a bunch of good hits. When I looked at who else had this page bookmarked I found a ton of other awesome DIY wind project pages. What an awesome tool to do research!

The best part is you can search for a single tag like wind by typing in your web browser "http://delicious.com/tag/wind" - that's it! the book was right on. Then I wanted the RSS feed, so you just add that to the web address "http://delicious.com/rss/tag/wind". I am now linked to the feed.

For classroom enhancement this tool will be a great aid. If you need some ideas for hands on projects to supplement difficult dry topics, this will help you find them. I think this will be great for apprenticeship training or other interactive sessions, as someone seems to have posted projects they have already tried and completed - the wind example even had instructions and a material list. This could cut down on some of the research end of planning some class activities.

Go to http://delicious.com/slockie to see what I came up with.