Using Delicious the Social Bookmarking Website

Delicious is a social bookmarking website which allows you to store bookmarks for your favourite websites online, share them with others and see what websites are the most popular amongst users. It is free to create an account, the website is easy to use and it can be a great way to organise your favourite websites and find good resources bookmarked by other like minded people.

The website was started by a guy called Joshua Schachter in 2003 and, after it took off successfully, Yahoo bought it in 2005. It is a completely free resource and the website features a simple layout and design which is functional and very ease to use. Initially useful as a way of keeping track of your favourite websites it offered users a bookmark list that they could access online on any computer. As the service began to grow the community naturally filtered the web and provided a valuable research shortcut, if you are looking for a website on any specific topic simply enter the tag or search term and the websites with the most bookmarks will be highlighted. This makes Delicious a great time saver and a source of community ranked websites which is completely free of editorial control.

You can sign up for delicious.com for free and it is quick and painless to create an account and get started. The site has millions of users and because each website they bookmark has a tag attached you can search for subjects by tag and find a list of the most popular websites in that category. You can also add your own favourites easily via the browser or install toolbars for Internet Explorer or Firefox so you can simply click the tag button and add the website you are currently surfing. You can tag websites however you like, a single search term or multiple tags, it’s entirely up to you.

Once you have joined Delicious you can also add other users to your network, friends, family, co-workers or people you’ve noticed that have bookmarks you like, this can be a great way of finding new resources. The service will compile a list of all the favourite bookmarks from your network so you can see the most popular sites in your group at a glance. You can also divide your network into separate groups and you can subscribe to specific keywords so new resources added under that keyword from your network will be highlighted to you.