Deliciously Clever: Social Bookmarking

In constant fear of my laptop crapping out of me I'm forever saving things to an external drive. I'm on my third hard drive (although the first two went in the first year and I'm on year 4...so far so good) and my computer has started making slow start up noises.

After learning about delicious.com from a tech session at a conference and it being part of a class this past semester I'm starting to take advantage of it.

While delicious might bring to mind thoughts of consumption...

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This is what I'm talking about:

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If it's new to you, delicious is a easy and incredibly accessible way to manage your online bookmarks/favorites through a website rather than the browser on your computer. That way no matter where you are or if your computer is beyond resuscitation your bookmarks are saved and you can access them!

This is particularly appealing for me given the ridiculously extensive bookmarks I have in Firefox. It's also great for keeping any curriculum based websites I stumble across in one location. You can tag each URL with whatever you'd like, often times suggestions are available for you to select from. The only warning about these tags (which is common when it comes to tagging) is that you cannot place a space between words or each of those two words will become their own tag.

For example, I found some neat stuff for the unit I was teaching in Social Studies. I first tagged the sites as "Social Studies" and then realized that these were two different labels. They are now neatly labeled as "SocialStudies". You can also put an underscore if you wish - "Social_Studies"

The extra awesome thing about delicious is that you can browse and search websites that others have added to delicious. This is great if you are coming up empty when Google-ing and are at the verge of pulling your hair out. With a few key word searches delicious comes up with a bunch of websites that Google would not have churned out in their search engine results - or at least on the first few pages of the 100's that you'll take the time to look through.

Today I decided to add all of the bookmarks that I have in Firefox and saved them into my delicious account (you can snoop at it here) just in case my computer does kick the bucket.

Can you tell I'm on holidays still with the continual posting and internet housekeeping? I cannot promise this type of upkeep when classes start up again on Monday. But I'll do my best.