11: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Delicious is an online bookmarking manager. It allows you to add your favorite web sites and share them with others. It's great if you want access to your bookmarks from multiple computers. Just like Flickr, where you can organize your photos using tags, using Delicious you can also organize your bookmarks with tags any way you want to. What makes Delicious attractive to its users is the social aspect. You may think you have found some great web sites and then you tag them, but you are also able to see what other people have bookmarked and see what else they have tagged that may be of interest to you.

To learn about bit more about social bookmarking and Delicious, please watch this short (~3 min.) video from the people at Common Craft.


For this exercise, you need to visit Delicious and type something of interest into the search bar. Spend some time discovering the interface.

Here is a sample search with the term "chemistry":


Find another user's trail and you may just discover a new wealth of information. Create a blog post discussing what you find and what you think of social bookmarking on your blog.

Optional (but recommended): Sign up and become a Delicious user; it's a great way of keeping track of interesting websites, especially if you are someone that works from a few different locations or you want to share links with others.

In your blog post, you may address any of the following questions.

• Do you think that using tags is a good way to organize your bookmarks/favorites?
• Were you able to find sites which you were previously unaware of through Delicious?
• What do you think is the biggest advantage/disadvantage of using Delicious?
• Do you think you will be able to use this in your professional or personal life? Why or why not?

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Delicious Tips:

• Yahoo account users can login to Delicious without creating a new account. This can be a big time saver when getting started with Delicious and it's one less username/password combo for you to remember. 
• Have the computer remember your username and password for Delicious so you don't need to type it in each time you use the Web 2.0 tool.
• Tags in Delicious are separated using spaces. So, if you wanted to tag something as expensive and as a cool toy, you would enter the tags as:

expensive cooltoy