Thoughts on Delicious

With so much information readily available on the internet today on virtually any topic, having something to personally organize it all becomes almost imperativel. "Del.icio.us" is an excellent way to do just that.

Del.icio.us is a system for archiving information and discovering new and useful sites, which is constantly adding, reviewing, and filtering new information. The community of del.icio.us allows you to find some of the best resources on the Internet without having to sort through all of the junk, while giving you a centralized management system for organizing information from around the internet.

However, many people are unaware of it’s complete list of features and valuable add-ons. For example, the Del.icio.us Firefox Extension allows you to quickly and easily add sites you like to del.icio.us with a bookmarklet. This tool puts a “My del.icio.us” button at the top of your browser, allowing you to view your save pages at the click of a button. Also, if you’re a fan of Google Reader, then you’ll definitely want to start using Google Reader + del.icio.us. This is a Greasemonkey script that puts an “add to del.icio.us” button at the bottom of each post in Google Reader. With a single click, you will be able to transfer interesting posts from Google Reader into your del.icio.us bookmark collection. There is also a Greasemonkey script called Newsmasher that places a small “del.icio.us” tag on the upper left corner of your browser. When clicked, a small window appears displaying what del.icio.us users are writing about the page you are viewing. This is a great way to get quick feedback on any website you’re visiting.

In addition to all of the features mentioned above, you can also share your latest del.icio.us bookmarks on your websites for all of your readers to enjoy. You can do this using Linkrolls and Tagrolls. (Linkrolls display your latest del.icio.us bookmarks while tagrolls display all of your del.icio.us tags in a tag cloud)

Consequently, of all of the detailed and useful features of del.icio.us, I think this capability of sharing your bookmarks with others is especially relevant to the field of education and music education. Building a social network of resources for teaching and learning is critical since educators must continuously be learning, updating, and increasing their "pool" of knowledge. As colleagues, we can help students through helping each other 'sift' through and utilize the very best of the seemingly infinite amount of data that can be found through the internet.