I'm pretty sceptical about the usefulness of Delicious for me. I've added several of my favourite websites, and added the History Faculty to my network. However, I have a lot of static bookmarks on Mozilla that I use on my laptop, and I've arranged it so my most frequently used ones begin with unique letters, so Hotmail is the only H, and Googlemail the only G, etc. This means there's a big time/hassle difference between going Alt+B+[letter] and having the page instantly load, and going to Delicious, signing in, finding the pages I want and opening them in new windows, as I usually want several at once.
I suppose there might be occasions when I'm at an unfamiliar computer and would want them, but a quick google search would do the job just as well, as I only have a small number of sites I use all the time. I'm not actively looking for new sites to visit, so whilst I might mine the HFL page for some ideas, I don't habitually need to find more 'delicious' websites to sample all the time.
As for library pages, I don't think Delicious has (or will) become well-known enough for it to be worthwhile. I've been asking quite a lot of people, mainly students, and no one I know outside of library work has heard of it, or of social bookmarking. I'd be very interested to hear about students who are using it, and do know all about it, though, so if anyone has had a different experience, please do drop me a comment!
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I know you mentioned Mozilla in this post, but if you use Firefox as well, have you tried the Delicious plugin? I found this made it a lot more useful for me - it was simpler to add bookmarks, and also (whilst signed in) they get integrated with my normal bookmarks (so I can still use keyboard shortcuts, the address bar, etc. to access them). I must admit that I share your need for further convincing though - I assume social bookmarking is most useful for discovering and sharing new sites (as opposed to documenting those you already use) but you need a larger number of people with similar interests using it (and in the same network) for this to happen!
ReplyDeleteThanks Jess - no, I didn't use the plugin, but I'll give it a try, as it sounds a lot closer to what I want! And yes, it does seem that Delicious hasn't yet hit the critical mass of users to make it actually useful!
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