Delicious

   I have been using Delicious for the last two months and with any program there are some pros and cons. Creating the account was not difficult, what I found challenging was finding others accounts so I could follow them. The search function didn’t work as I thought it would. I was typing in “sissocialmedia”, which was the tag we were to use for the subject, but it found nothing.  Searching for “INF506 social media” I was able to find others who are doing the subject through their stacks and follow their feeds and links to people they were following that I found appropriate. I found the feeds to be a good way of seeing what is new and would be of related to my subject as well as of professional and personal interest. My feeds got full very quickly, as I don't go back to delicious regularly to check what is new, I used it as more of a place to store my own links. I was concerned about sharing my links as I wondered how I assess what are my best links to share. Perhaps people would not be interested in my bookmarks.

   My favourite is the stack function, a great way to organise your links. I liked that you can publish your stack and was really interested in checking out other people’s stacks. I believe the stack function would be a good tool for classroom use. Looking through other peoples stack collections I have seen some that have been created for a particular topic in class. I love the idea of being able to use this in the library to help with student assignments as a type of pathfinder. The stack function could also be used for collecting professional links for staff within all departments of the school, they could share bookmarks for specific topics and subjects or professional development links.

   Adding bookmarks and tags is a simple process. What I couldn’t do was copy over my large collection of bookmarks on my computer in one go, instead I had to copy and paste. The tags were you add search terms or subject terms, are useful when searching delicious and you own collection of links. Delicious is good way to collect bookmarks, so when your computer crashes or needs updating you still have all your important bookmarks stored in your delicious account.

   I will continue to use Delicious to store my personal bookmarks and will use it to collect bookmarks in subjects’ stacks for use by students. I will also consider creating a library stack to share with my library staff colleagues.