Delicious.com – free your bookmarks

One of the best features of web browsers when they first became popular with start of the mass use of the Internet back in the 90s was the ability to save, or bookmark, favourite web sites. Making it easy to find them again. Bookmarks are still a major feature of all browsers and there have been various advances and additions that make them easier to use and more useful. The problem with the bookmarks in your browser, on your computer is that if you go to another computer or even use a different browser on your computer then you don’t have access to them.

Over the past few years services that solve this problem have sprung up on the Internet. They are websites where you can register and then bookmark web sites from any computer and access them from any computer. These services are called social bookmarking services. The name suggests one of their major features, the ability to share your bookmarks with other people (if you want to) and collaborate in building lists of useful web sites.

The biggest and probably best known of these sites is called Delicious.com (formally Del.icio.us). It has a well defined interface and makes it easy to add bookmarks into your account. When you bookmark a web site you can add tags which describe or categorise the site to make it easier for you and others (if you share your bookmarks) to find the bookmark in the future. The tags also allow the grouping together of related websites. For example at the bottom of this post I have included a feed from my delicious bookmarks that are tagged with the tag ‘UCC-Maths’.

This can be useful for keeping your bookmarks organised, but it can also have benefits with your classes. The sharing features of Delicious mean that you could bookmark websites that you find that would be useful for your pupils to look at, maybe for revision or for enrichment around the topics you are teaching. If you tagged these bookmarks with a unique tag (e.g. mrdolan-year10) then they can search for the tag on Delicious.com and find all of your suggestions. They can then add them to their own delicious account if they have one, or they can subscribe to the RSS feed for that tag (More about RSS feeds in a future post).

The great thing about this is that once they have subscribed to your tag then they will be updated every time you add a new bookmark and will immediately be able to find whatever fantastic resource you have discovered.

If you have access to a website then you can post create dynamic list of your bookmarks that will update automatically as you add new links. Below is an automatically updating list of the latest bookmarks I have made with one of my tags.