Delicious for Research and Keeping Track of your Bookmarks

Delicious for Research and Keeping Track of your Bookmarks
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Delicious

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.

History of Delicious

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.

Getting Started

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.

Building a Network

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.

Using Delicious as a Promotional Tool

If you intend to use Delicious as a promotional tool it is important to build up a network of friends. While all your tags are by default public if you just add the websites or pages that you want to promote to your own profile there is no guarantee anyone else will ever use that as a resource and each one you add essentially only counts as one vote for that resource. If you build up a network then when you add new bookmarks you can send them to your friends. You’ll also receive a message about new bookmarks they add. If you want to get traffic from Delicious then it is best not to spam people with your own web pages, in fact this is expressly forbidden in their terms. Try to use the resource in a genuine way and if you create interesting and useful lists then the chance of other people taking notice of new bookmarks you add is greatly improved. It is also a good idea to add a Delicious button to your posts or web pages so other users can easily add the content of your website to their bookmarks.

Refining Searches

There are various ways to refine your searches on Delicious to ensure you get the results you are looking for. You can use multiple keywords or tags simply by listing them in the search window with a space in between each tag, the more you add the more refined your search will be. If you want to limit the search to specific tags then prefix it with “tag:”. You can also bundle your tags into related categories if you like. By using your delicious inbox and subscribing to specific tags or users you can also get a steady supply of links that are likely to interest you.

Conclusion

Delicious is a versatile tool which is great for sharing links with a network of people and finding quality new resources on topics you are interested in. It is a helpful website for research and this is probably the best way to use it, unlike some other social media websites it is not ideally suited to promoting your own content.