Friday, October 08, 2010

Delicious: mmmmm tasty!

Bobby Flay's German Chocolate Cake
(flickr photo via kimberlykv, recipe here)

You mean I can't just talk about cake for the whole entry? Darn...

Delicious (formerly known as de.licio.us)
I really like Delicious a whole, whole lot. I use it like crazy for both personal and professional bookmarking - so much so that, except for a few sites that I use extremely frequently, I do all of my bookmarking with Delicious. What makes Delicious so much more useful to me?

1. I can add my bookmarks to Delicious from any computer. No matter whether I'm at home, at the ref. desk, or at my own desk, I can see all of my bookmarks. This is great, as I'm always running across cool craft projects to do with teens while surfing around for fun at home.

2. Tagging lets the organization of my bookmarks grow organically. With regular web bookmarks, I have to either decide on a folder scheme from the outset, or just make a huge long list and eventually try to organize it into folders. On Delicious, bookmarks with similar tags are automatically grouped together, and I can add as many tags as I need. It's a lot quicker.

3. The Delicious button/add-on for Explorer/Firefox is awesome. I can tag and bookmark pages without leaving the page and losing my place. Search these tools out if you're interested; they're easy to install and completely worth the trouble.
GOLD! EUREKA!

4. I can take advantage of other folks' work in mining the Internet. The Internet is a huge place. Wide swathes of it are just useless grit, and the best tiny flakes of 'gold' are often in weird unfindable nooks and crannies. For instance, I just searched for "teen programming" and found this great blog to which I immediately subscribed. A Google search for "teen programming" did not find it (at least it wasn't on the first 3 pages of results).

Have some good links that you think will be useful for other NOPL staff? Please let me know. I will give you the login credentials for the NOPL Delicious account and you can make us privy to your Internet 'gold'!

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