Exercise 5: Internal Collaboration -- Using Delicious

For the most part (before this class), my interactions with the social bookmarking site Delicious have been minimal.  It always seemed like too much trouble to set up an account using my Yahoo! ID (which I rarely use for anything) just to put my bookmarks up on a website, especially since I already had a perfectly serviceable bookmark function in my browser.  I did set up an account for another class as part of an assignment, but as soon as the class was over, I never visited my Delicious bookmarks again.

Of course, I now realize that I was really only using one aspect of the service: saving my bookmarks.  What I wasn't utilizing was the thing that makes Delicious what it is: I wasn't sharing my bookmarks with anyone.  Nor was I using the social tagging feature to find good links posted by other users.

Now, after completing this exercise, Delicious seems less like a gimmick and more like a tool.  Not only can users browse around for interesting links with those tags, Delicious provides people with similar interests a way to share resources.  It can be especially useful for communities of users with similar interests who need online resources.  People like teachers, librarians, students, or any other community with research needs can combine, share, and organize the resources they've found online.  Just link-sharing with my classmates provided me with a ton of great new resources relevant to my studies.  And searching for tags like "socialbookmarking", "web2.0", and "socialmedia" produced even more great resources.

I can definitely see how using a service like Delicious can be helpful when looking for resources.  I might worry about inaccurate tags, though.  The lack of any standard tags could also be a problem.  For example, when looking up resources on social bookmarking, some links were tagged with "socialbookmarking," while others were tagged with "social" and "bookmarking."  Still others were tagged with "tagging," and "social" "tagging."  So in conclusion, Delicious can be a great resource, but users should be aware of possibly inaccurate tags or tags with multiple meanings.