I’ve been using Delicious for more than five years now (my first bookmarks were added on 20 August 2003!) and I can’t live without it. Granted, I still use the bookmarks toolbar in my browsers for the sites I visit constantly, but I consider my Delicious account my archive. I also use my Delicious account in a somewhat unique way in that I use it to organize the links for all my workshops and presentations.
Pre-Delicious when someone attended one of my workshops they would get a floppy disk (yep, remember those) which always contained at least one file, a Web page with links to all the sites I presented in class. Although this worked, there were problems, the main one being that there was no way for me to keep those links up to date for those that had attended a previous class. (This was also back when sharing wasn’t considered as important so part of the idea was to only give the links to those that took the class. I’m totally over that now.)
So, with Delicious I can just give attendees a single URL and tell them to go there and get all the links. For example, the links for my XHTML workshop can be found at http://delicious.com/travelinlibrarian/class-xhtml. This way as I change the class, and change the relevant links, the list is always relevant and up-to-date. And, because most of my bookmarks are public the attendees can explore beyond those bookmarks through to related ones via tags and the rest of my account through to the accounts of other Delicious users.
I also encourage the use of the Delicious tag clouds on library sites. So much so that the new version of the RVLS site (which I designed) has a Delicious tag cloud. The forthcoming redesigned Panhandle site will also include a Delicious tag cloud if everything goes to plan.
I could continue on for a whole book chapter on Delicious… wait, I already have! 
(Bonus points for figuring out the relevance of the image in this post.)
I use Del.icio.us a lot! I’ve still got a a set of my most used bookmarks in my browser for quick access but pretty much everything else goes into my Del.icio.is account. Most importantly I use my account to post the links that are relevant to my workshops and presentations. For example, I’ve tagged all the links for my blogging workshop with "class-blogs". This way, I can sent all of the blogging workshop attendees to http://del.icio.us/travelinlibrarian/class-blogs instead of giving them a piece of paper with a long list of sites and URLs on it. Also, with this method, after class, attendees can return to this URL whenever they like and see the most recent resources that I feel are relevant to the topic. I’ve been doing this for a little over two years now and all my students have grabbed onto the concept quite well.
Bill Drew posted a mini-rant on his blog yesterday titled "Blog posts with no content". In this short post he complained about those who create blog posts that had no narrative but that "contain only links to things they added in del.icio.us." His reasoning: "If it is important enough for you to post a link in your blog, then write a full post about the topic."
Sorry Bill, but as someone who does the thing you’re complaining about (sort of) I respectively disagree. To explain the "sort of" I don’t post my del.icio.us links as a blog post but if you subscribe to my blog’s feed you will get one item per day that contains the items I bookmarked that day. Since most people read my blog as a feed, I believe this would count to Bill.
I post my bookmarks because people might be interested in what I’m currently researching, preparing for, or just looking into. On a day in which I have six new links to the Kindle, this would imply that I’m thinking about it. Recently I’ve been adding bookmarks for Web site dealing with Creative Commons. Not because I have something particular to say about it right now, but because I’ll be presenting a full-session on the topic at CIL2008. Maybe I’m bookmarking sites in preparation for a blog post in the next few days.
In any case, I like seeing people’s new bookmarks without having to get yet another feed from del.icio.us. It’s something they’re doing and so I like all that info in one place. Ultimately, I find a lot of cool new resources from such posts so it’s worth my time to at least glance at them.
Now, as for reposting tweets on your blog, that’s the one that bugs me. Mainly because if I read your blog chances are you’re a Twitter friend too and I don’t need to see those posts twice. More importantly a day full of Twitter posts as a blog post completely takes them out of context of the conversation at the time making them mostly unintelligible.
Jo Haight Sarline, Denver Public Library
Carson Block, Fort Collins Public Library
John Sulshaw, University of Colorado-Boulder
Jimmy Thomas & Susan Staples, Weld Library District
Jeff Donlan, Salida Regional Library
Sharon Morris, Colorado State Library
- Susan
- 1st year w/ library system
- previously in manufacturing and healthcare
- invest in the virtual
- how much can be put online?
- online collaboration
- online training
- online surveys
- translation services
- 170+ lanugages
- dial a number and get an interperter online
- <$100/mo
- Concact center concept
- easy, catchy phone number
- metrics
- Hot
- USB cooler shirt
- ID rings
- DVD vending
- bestseller vending ouside the library
- John
- mobile computing
- new content & content management models
- supporting users in an advanced age of technology
- authentication
- portals
- blogs & wikis
- increased collaboration
- social networking
- MySpace
- 84 million users
- 2 million new users a month
- 48mil unique visits
- 51% of 13-17 year olds online
- 79% are 18+
- 25mil are over 30
- YouTube
- Google paid $1.65 Billion
- 100 mil videos watched a day
- 65k uploaded a day
- What’s going to become of the ILS?
- Disintergaration (Marshal Breeding)
- Institutional repositories
- Libraries need to support all this stuff
- security issues
- open source model moving to libraries
- programming skills
- Jimmy
- (Aquabrowser)
- OCLC Perceptions Report
- Searches done at his member libraries (top queries in OPACs)
- My Account, Library Hours
- Library Journal Hotline
- The next library building
- “place”
- Jeff
- Maximize use of the OPAC
- Clean up our database
- Having functional PCs for the patrons
- Let patrons plug in their hardware
- E-media market needs to be “better sorted out”
- Skype
- Carson
- Building a staff that represent different parts of my brain but can also built on that
- Deliver information to people without barriers
- Be more involved in the culture
- Second Life Library 2.0
- Balancing abilities and constraints of what staff can do to meet the needs of users
- Technology is not always the solution
- Sharon
- Dutch Aquabrowser guys are “hot”
- Library Elf
- Plinket
- The Engaged Patron
- LibraryThing
- Free online e-books and e-audiobooks
- Second Life Library 2.0
- Searching for information is changing
- Retrevr
- Search fickr by shape & color
- Aquabrowser
- del.icio.us
- wikis
- blogs
- podcasting
- YouTube
- set aside time every week to look at something new
- libraries have a “role to inspire”
- Jo
- Be the enabler for your cusomers
- be there, be in those spaces
- you feel comfortable, they’ll feel comfortable
- downloadable media
- convergence of everything
- everyone is a creator
- create a space where your patrons can be a creator
- tagging content
- no geographical boundaries
- look outside the library world for ideas and solutions
- be where your customers are complainaing about you
- viral marketing
- gaming
dead.licious is a tool for verifying that all of your bookmarks in your del.icio.us accounts are still valid and gives you the option of removing those dead links. Unfortunately, it’s only available for the Mac. (Michael Stephens, let me know how well it works.) Someone please make a PC version of this.
TagFetch is a new search engine that allows you to enter a keyword and perform a search against the tags in flickr, YouTube, Newsvine, reddit, tailrank, del.icio.us, technorati, and feedster. Shown right is the results for a simple search on “library”.
The links on the left (News, Blogs, Bookmarks, and Media) allow you to limit your results by type of service. This can also be done on the main search page but I told it to search everything for testing purposes. Also, the list of “Popular TagFetches” on the left are interesting yet somewhat predictable. (It’s nice to see “Web 2.0″ in the top five along with Lindsay Lohan, booth babes, sex, and porn.)
I’ve been using Delicious for more than five years now (my first bookmarks were added on 20 August 2003!) and I can’t live without it. Granted, I still use the bookmarks toolbar in my browsers for the sites I visit constantly, but I consider my Delicious account my archive. I also use my Delicious account in a somewhat unique way in that I use it to organize the links for all my workshops and presentations.
