[This is a guest post by Derek Bruff, assistant director at the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching and senior lecturer in mathematics at Vanderbilt. You can follow Derek on Twitter (@derekbruff) and on his blog, where he writes about educational technology, student motivation, and visual thinking, among other topics. At ProfHacker, he has written about Multiple Choice Questions on Exams, Pre-Class Quizzes on WordPress, and Motivating Students with Application Projects and Poster Sessions.]
On Jennifer Imazeki’s great Economics for Teachers blog, Jennifer recently asked for suggestions why one might make the jump from “regular” bookmarking (saving interesting websites using the bookmarks or favorites tool in your browser) to social bookmarking (using an online service like Delicious or Diigo to save those interesting websites). Jennifer’s post got me thinking about why I’m a fan of Delicious, the social bookmarking service I use regularly. (Caveat: Some people rave about Diigo. I tried it only very briefly and found it too confusing, but perhaps I didn’t give it a fair shake. At any rate, I can only speak with experience about Delicious.)
- Ubiquity: Instead of having all my bookmarks trapped in one particular browser on one particular computer, I have them available from any Web-connected device. This means that whether I’m using my work laptop, my home desktop, or my Android smartphone, I have access to my bookmarks. More importantly, I can save bookmarks to Delicious on these various platforms quickly and easily, using platform-specific tools that Delicious and others have made, like the Firefox browser add-on.
- Tag Suggestions: Not only does Delicious suggestion “auto-completions” to tags as you start typing them (just like Firefox does), but it will often also suggest several tags for a website all on its own based on how other Delicious users have tagged the site. For instance, when I bookmark Jennifer’s Economics for Teachers blog, I’m told that popular tags for the site include blog, blogs, economics, and education. Moreover, I’m given a few recommended tags from my own tag collection: blogs, education, and teaching. All you have to do is click on the tags Delicious suggests to use them. This makes the tagging process fast and consistent and often leads to helpful tags I wouldn’t have thought to use.
- Tag Drilldown: I’ve been doing a lot of reading about visual thinking lately. As a result, I currently have 85 bookmarks with the “vizthink” tag on Delicious. Let’s say I’m putting together a workshop on visual thinking, and I’d like a nice example of using visual techniques for taking notes during a talk. From my “vizthink” tag page, I can see all the other tags I’ve used along with the “vizthink” tag, including “notetaking.” When I click on “notetaking,” I see only the 9 bookmarks that have both tags and can quickly scan them for useful examples. Since I have 12 “notetaking” bookmarks in all, this drilldown is truly useful—it lets me eliminate the 3 “notetaking” bookmarks that don’t also have “vizthink” tags./li>
- Easy Sharing: Notice how I linked to different sets of my bookmarks in the last paragraph? Since my Delicious bookmarks are online, it’s easy to share them with others. This came in handy last spring when I collaborated with a couple of colleagues on a couple of workshops. And since Delicious automatically generates RSS feeds for just about everything, it’s easy to embed Delicious bookmarks in other settings. For example, in the sidebar on my course blog, you’ll find the Delicious feed for the “fywscrypto” tag I’m having my students use to tag resources in the first-year writing seminar on cryptography I’m teaching this fall.
ProfHacker Brian Croxall has said that for him, Delicious is a place “where links go to die,” so it’s probably worth mentioning a bit about how I tend to use Delicious. One way I’ve already mention—I’m putting together a workshop or lesson on a particular topic and I want to know what’s caught my eye lately on that topic. Sure, I could try to remember what I’ve seen lately on the topic and Google my way back to those resources, but my memory just isn’t that great. (Often, I’ll remember that I heard a story on a podcast, but I won’t remember which podcast it was!) Another use for Delicious occurs when someone asks me if I know of any good resources on a particular topic. Since I work as a teaching consultant, I get questions like this all the time. Again, instead of trying to remember what I’ve seen lately, I can just send a link to my Delicious tag page for that topic.
I don’t use Delicious as a place to save things that I really want to read later. At Brian Croxall’s suggestion, I’ve been experimenting with Read It Later for that. (I’ve gotten much more mileage out of Read It Later since I bought my Android smartphone, using it to make more productive use of my down time when I’m out and about—and not driving.) Instead, I use Delicious to organize resources I might find useful down the road. Sure, I could use my browser’s bookmark tool for that, but the features I’ve described above make Delicious a clear win over a browser-based tool.
What’s your experience with social bookmarking, even when you’re not feeling social?
[Image by Flickr user chotda; Creative Commons licensed.]
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12 Responses to Social Bookmarking Even When You’re Not Social: Why I Use Delicious
jmittell - August 26, 2010 at 5:37 pm
The other key benefit of Delicious (which is how I save all bookmarks) is built-in backup. Prior to using Delicious, I found that I hadn’t recently backed-up my Firefox profile when my harddrive died, meaning many bookmarks died with it. Since Delicious saves bookmarks in the cloud, you don’t lose anything when your harddrive dies, which has happened twice since I switched to Delicious. (And remember – it’s “when” your harddrive dies, not “if”…)
micahvandegrift - August 26, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I have used Delicious for a while now and it’s funny that Prof. Croxall says links go there to die because I’m pretty sure that might be true for me too. I always save things there with the absolute intention of returning to them someday. I use Read It Later also (great iPad app too) but don’t go there to read things either. For me both services work as a resource directory more than anything, similar to your approach. I save pages that I know I’ll need in the future, like a handy XHTML guide, and I have actually gone back to those resources more so than articles. I never really got into the ‘social’ side of the bookmarking, but the cloud-based reserve of things I think/thought were important… That makes sense. Things I want to read and comment on, I have to read and comment on right away. The info stream too easily becomes a flood otherwise.
edwebb - August 27, 2010 at 8:22 am
I’m definitely in the camp of those who ‘rave about Diigo’ – I use it all the time, and have introduced it to some of my students – those who take to it, really take to it. It does everything Delicious does, with the addition of in-page highlighting and commenting, so it is a social annotation tool as well as a social bookmarking tool. I encourage your readers to try both services – go to http://www.diigo.com/index to see the video introduction to Diigo. The one somewhat persuasive argument I have heard for Delicious over Diigo is that the former has a larger, more established user base. The easy way I have found to deal with that is to have Diigo autopost my bookmarks to Delicious also (although the annotations do not carry over), so the bookmarks at http://www.diigo.com/user/edwebb also appear at http://www.delicious.com/ed.webb (NB – this article led me to discover that there has been a two-month gap in the automatic sharing since Delicious changed its login procedures over to Yahoo accounts – so thanks!)
jepaul211 - August 27, 2010 at 9:34 am
I use Delicious in my large healthcare management and leadership class and ask students to post and annotate links that they find of relevance to course, using the course tag. Much better way of sharing than the more typical emailing of the url to the instructor/TA, and then having it posted to the course website. Some students then run with the program for their other work, which is satisfying.
cfurchner - August 27, 2010 at 10:37 am
I’ve used both Delicious and Diigo, and I prefer Diigo for the richness of its features (although Delicious is simpler to learn). I have several Diigo lists, which I share with different interest groups (e.g., web design, web2.0, dog information); it’s a level of organization that goes beyond the very handy tags. I also create a list for each major topic in my psychology classes, and I share these lists with my classes as “supplementary information” and a source of recent articles about the topics. I guess this is “w”Web1.5″ – I haven’t yet used Diigo in a truly social, interactive manner, but Diigo Groups do enable this.
lrebar - August 27, 2010 at 2:42 pm
As a librarian, I find that Delicious is a great tool for finding new (and heavily used) resources for a subject you are unfamiliar with, or finding additional resources on a topic for which you want updates by searching “everyone’s” bookmarks. Delicious can also be used as a collaboration tool within a company/office by designating one delicious account which is used by all interested parties and to which all can contribute on the items of interest to the entire office. I find something of interest and the entire Reference Department can access that information at the Reference Desk (and beyond), and can easily add their own links of common interest. Finally, Delicious makes it easy to “follow” someone in your network – someone(s) who have the same interests as you and therefore finds links of common interest, as well as a great way to share information with colleagues (don’t copy your links into an email, tell someone how to network to your links and they will always get all of the links you have created to date). I also have used as a student to keep track of links for particular classes, and have had classmates share their links within the class too.
billso - August 27, 2010 at 2:50 pm
I’ve been using the service since 2005 when it was called del.icio.us – as of this week, I have over 4500 URLs in my account. It’s a great service. I’ve never used it in a course, but I can see the value.See my blog post from earlier this week, Lots of delicious links.Evernote had support for delicious in 2008 – it was possible to import links directly into Evernote. I think they dropped the feature. http://blog.evernote.com/2009/01/22/google-notebook-import-2/
derekbruff - August 27, 2010 at 4:40 pm
@jmittell: Great point about backup. One of the perks of living in the cloud! The flipside is, of course, that you can’t access your bookmarks when you’re not online. But with bookmarks, why would you want to?@edwebb: You’re tempting me to try Diigo. One perk of the large user base for Delicious is that for many pages, Delicious recommends very useful tags since it has a lot of user tags to draw from.@jepaul211: Glad to hear that your students find the service useful enough to use it even when not required! I find it exciting to see one of my student’s names in the Delicious feed for my course. You never know what you’ll find when you click their link.@lrebar: I haven’t used Delicious as a discovery tool, but I can see the value in that. Delicious will tell you how many users have bookmarked a particular site, which gives you a sense of its popularlity, if not its usefulness. This amplification of the “good stuff” is a useful feature that I haven’t used as much as I could.@billso: Wow, that’s a lot of links. You have so many tags your cloud tag took a little while to come up! Do you find that you can find the links you want to find with such a large collection? I’m guessing that the features I outlined in my post scale up pretty well, but I’m wondering what your experience is.
rickman - August 29, 2010 at 10:58 pm
I’ve been using delicious since 2004 and have more than 8000 bookmarks, and yet, like Brian Croxall and micahvandegrift, I often find that links go there to die, and recently increasingly I’ve been using Yojimbo instead. That’s despite going through various spurts of feeding my links back to myself through RSS on my blog and so on. Another issue is tag proliferation, despite the good suggestion feature. Tag bundles, and the nice popup autocompletion list when you’re browsing, mean it’s not really a major problem, though.The biggest issue, I think, is that, unless you know that you’ve definitely already bookmarked something on delicious, it’s quicker to do a Google search than to (1) browse/search one’s own bookmarks, (2) search all Delicious bookmarks, (3) give up and do a Google search anyway. I’m not sure about speed nowadays, but there have been times in delicious’s evolution when browsing/searching, though not usually posting, have been excrutiatingly slow.On the ubiquity issue, Leo Laporte on MacBreak Weekly was recently heard to say “Does anyone still use Delicious?” (or words to that effect). That got me wondering: With the recent popularity of services like Reddit and Twitter, is Delicious really all that popular still?
derekbruff - August 30, 2010 at 10:21 am
I’m not sure how popular Delicious is these days, but I think there’s a difference between running a Google search for a resource on a particular topic and sifting through ones Delicious bookmarks on that topic. In the former, you’re trusting Google’s algorithms (admittedly, very well-tuned algorithms) to turn up something useful. In the latter, you’ve already vetted the links, so anything you find is likely to be useful.Heading for Twitter is somewhere in between, I think. If you know that your contacts on Twitter have vetted a link, it’s probably going to be useful, even if you haven’t already vetted it yourself. This is the kind of thing Facebook and Twitter are banking on, that you’ll trust your friends’ recommendations over Google’s algorithm for good information.As you mention, @rickman, if you remember a particular resource you bookmarked in the past, a Google search might be faster than searching through one’s Delicious bookmarks. I don’t always find that to be the case, however, thanks to the tag drilldown feature.Thanks for the comment!
lee77 - August 31, 2010 at 8:00 am
This column triggered my effort to use Delicious for the first time – while I have no interest in sharing my bookmarks with others, the ability to have bookmarks in one place was very appealing. However, the need to create a Yahoo account (and set/reset all the privacy features etc) definitely has damped my enthusiasm.
derekbruff - September 7, 2010 at 1:24 pm
@lee77: It appears that Delicious was recently purchased by Yahoo. At the time I wrote this post, you didn’t need to create a Yahoo account to start using Delicious. It’s a shame that they’ve added that extra layer of complexity.