The 1500th bookmark in my Delicious account is a page on the Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) site.

Tuesday I’ll be giving a short presentation, 10 to 15 minutes, about Delicious for All-College Development Day at Red Rocks Community College.

I found these recent YouTube videos that should be a good resource for anyone interested in using Delicious:

“Creating a Delicious Account“

“Adding Bookmarks to Delicious“

“Searching Delicious“

If I have time, which is unlikely, it might be worth mentioning delizzy and Bookmarks inSuggest.

I’ve added Ellyssa Kroski’s Web 2.0 for Librarians and Information Professionals to my Recommended Reading list.  Even though it’s written for librarians, it’s a good introduction to web 2.0.  She has chapters on the following:

• web 2.0
• blogs
• RSS and newsreaders
• wikis
• social bookmarking
• photo sharing
• social cataloging
• video sharing
• personalized start pages
• social networking software
• vertical search engines
• social news
• answers technology
• virtual worlds
• productivity tools
• podcasting
• mashups

I do have a couple of objections to her classifications:  (1) She included Second Life in a book on “web 2.0.”  To access Second Life, you have to download their software; it cannot be accessed on the web (i.e., by using a browser).  Therefore, in my mind, it doesn’t belong in this book.  (2) She included Ning in a chapter on “Mashups” when it clearly fits under social networks.

As I promised in a post earlier this month, here is my take on Bookmarks inSuggest:

If you enter your Delicious username, Bookmarks inSuggest “will analyze your online bookmarks and recommend other bookmarks that matches your taste.” 

Once you’ve typed in the username and clicked on “Continue,” you’ll see the tags in a column on the left under a search box, the most recent bookmarks in the center, and the suggested sites on the right.

For my bookmarks, inSuggest listed twenty tags, starting with the following:

• web2.0
• education
• tools
• elearning
• research
• secondlife
• free
• searchengine
• reference
• technology

You may click on any of the tags listed to get some of your own bookmarks with that tag and suggested bookmarks using it.

On the main page for my Delicious account, my “Top 10 Tags” are listed as

• web2.0
• education
• tools
• research
• searchengine
• elearning
• free
• blog
• wiki
• reference

secondlife is not in my top ten, nor are reference and technology.  However, the first suggestions offered are for sites related to Second Life:

• The SLED Picayune
• ICT Library
• Virtual World Resources (titled “List of Virtual Worlds” on the inSuggest page)
• Video Tutorials – Second Life Wiki
• Event Details | Subject Centre for Information and Computer Sciences

The fourth suggestion I already had bookmarked, and the fifth had little to do with Second Life.  It was a program for a conference held in 2007 with some presentations on Second Life.

It’s not clear where the suggestions come from.

inSuggest has three different pages where you can get suggestions for websites, images, and bookmarks based on your input. 

For Web inSuggest, just put in the address of a site to get recommendations for similar sites. 

I used Wetpaint’s home page and got the following top eight results:

• Wikispaces
• PBwiki
• Ning
• Zoho
• StumbleUpon
• Netvibes
• Go2Web20.net
• Weebly

Since the first two sites in the lefthand columns (Wikispaces and PBwiki) are the most closely related, I’m guessing that you should read down the first column and then down the second one to see now the results are ranked.

Given how little similarity (other than being web 2.0 applications) there is between Wetpaint and the other six hits, I’m not very impressed with the results I got.  Apparently someone has tagged the sites that come up, but I’m not sure who does that.  I couldn’t find a lot of information about inSuggest on the main page.

At some future time, I’ll look at Bookmark inSuggest.

Some of the blogs I read regularly have recent posts about the “new Delicious”:

• ReadWriteWeb:  “Delicious Finally Launches Version 2.0: Easier, Prettier, Faster“
• Yahoo! Search Blog:  “Making Social Bookmarking a bit more Delicious“
• eLearning Technology:  “Delicious Upgrade Only Skin Deep:  eLearning Technology“
• Jane’s E-Learning Pick of the Day:  “Delicious“

According to the delicious blog, “The new Delicious is just like the old del.icio.us, only faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more delightful to use and to look at.”  A faster search engine is good, but the rest of the updates seem to be just cosmetic.

One of the things I liked about the old del.icio.us was the clever name.  The new name is stale–to continue the food metaphor.

As I wrote in a post in April,

When I select a specific tag in my account, all the bookmarks with that particular tag show up, and I get a separate list of all the “related tags,” ones that appear with the first one on one or more bookmarks.  I have the option of clicking on the plus sign in front of any of those tags to limit the bookmarks showing to those with both tags–like a Boolean AND.  It would be really helpful to have to option of clicking on a minus sign–like a Boolean NOT–that would remove bookmarks with that tag.

In addition, since the site was changed, my new bookmarks haven’t been automatically posted to my blog as they were before.

For the ENGL 112 class I taught this semester for Mesa State College, I required the students to create and use del.icio.us accounts to keep track of web sites they found during their research.  This assignment was worth 50 out of 1000 points possible for the class (5%). 

Out of the 24 students enrolled in the class, 15 submitted the required research paper.  Those 15 students had the following numbers of bookmarks in their accounts:  2, 3, 6, 18, 18, 19, 27, 27, 28, 28, 30, 31, 38, 56, 83.  The average number of bookmarks is 27.6, and the median is 27.  I awarded two points per bookmark up through 25, 50 points total for 26 through 30 bookmarks, and up to ten extra points for students who had more than 30 bookmarks.

In their final entry in their research journals (blogs), I asked the students to “discuss the usefulness and effectiveness of the internet tools you used in the class: the blog, the del.icio.us bookmarks, and the class wiki.”  From their comments, it was clear that they found the bookmarking service the most useful (I’m not including students’ names or links to their blogs in order to protect their privacy):

• “The del.icio.us account was invaluable, and it helped keep me organize, and remember where I had found things without having to print off reams of paper. I also liked it because is really simplified the ‘works cited’ process.”
• “I found that the most useful tool was “delicious”. It made organizing the research paper so much easier. I was able to easily add, research and go back to the useful sites. I found it very useful when I was at the library and needed to look up a site for reference.”
• “I found the del.icio.us site to be the most helpful research tool, it was a way to organize things and make it easier to keep track of sites when moving from computer to computer. I have even tagged personal sites on my del.icio.us account.”
• “The del.icio.us bookmarks, saved me, I am horrible at writing things down, and this account let me bookmark the page and also leave notes to myself for each link.”
• “The del.icio.us bookmarks helped me keep my sources that I had used all in the same place that were easy to use so I never forgot where I had found information. It allowed me to be able to go back to it multiple times, and the notes that you could add in the box also helped me remember what specifically the source had in it before I even clicked on it.”

I plan to write about their comments on the blogs at a later date.

Last September, Joshua Schachter announced the launch of “an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign” in the delicious blog.  Another mention was posted later that month but nothing since.

I have an idea for a major improvement to delicious.  When I select a specific tag in my account, all the bookmarks with that particular tag show up, and I get a separate list of all the “related tags,” ones that appear with the first one on one or more bookmarks.  I have the option of clicking on the plus sign in front of any of those tags to limit the bookmarks showing to those with both tags–like a Boolean AND.  It would be really helpful to have to option of clicking on a minus sign–like a Boolean NOT–that would remove bookmarks with that tag.

In addition to having my students use blogs as research journals, they have to set up del.icio.us accounts to keep track of the web-based resources they identify.  Here are the instructions I gave for their initial bookmarking assignment:

Use the following sites to learn about social bookmarking and tags:

• Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• 7 Things You Should Know about Social Bookmarking
• Video: “SCPL del.icio.us tutorial 1″
• Video: “Inside//Out: del.icio.us”
• Video: “Del.icio.us – Store and Share Your Bookmarks”
• Video: “Getting Started with Del.icio.us”
• Video: “Del.icio.us Demo”
• What are tags?
• del.icio.us/help

Register for a social bookmarking account with del.icio.us. Please make sure that your username includes your first or last name, so I can identify your account.

Send an e-mail message to the instructor at elclark@mesastate.edu with the words “ENGL 112 Bookmarking” in the subject line. In the body of your message, copy and paste the URL of your del.icio.us page.

Start bookmarking websites you want to keep track of for class. These can be related to your topic or research in general. You might want to go back to the Week 1 Discussion and bookmark useful pages that you and your classmates found. Be sure you tag your bookmarks so you can find them again.

Feel free to explore my del.icio.us bookmarks and save any that you find interesting.