Monday, April 25, 2016

Delicious - a social bookmarking site

Several years ago, I discovered Delicious, a social bookmarking site. I found it to be very useful in managing all those web sites we want to revisit. It was purchased by Yahoo! and earlier this year the site received a major (and long overdue) overhaul.

For each site you want to remember, you add a link title and the URL. You then add tags to help you remember the things you find helpful on the site and can even add your own description.

Here's a sample of a few things I have tagged "genealogy":

A few of my Delicious bookmarks for genealogy.


I don't just use it for research sites. I also use it to help me remember things I want to see or places I might want to eat when I do research trips or conferences.

I haven't scoped out Fort Lauderdale restaurants (as of the time I'm writing this post) for NGS 2016, but here are a few of the ones I gathered for the 2014 conference in Richmond.

A few restaurants I gathered in preparation for NGS 2014 in Richmond.

While this isn't my complete list of tags, it will show my most common ones.

My most used Delicious tags.

You can also sort that list alphabetically to make it easier to locate a tag.

I did, however, mention that it is a "social bookmarking" site. Users may follow other persons. (For any of you wanting to follow me, I'm "tnlori.") I also "pin" things to Pinterest, but Delicious is great for sites that are not "pinnable." Also, I've been using Delicious much longer because it pre-dated Pinterest.

Another genealogist and I once collaborated on a project involving research in multiple states. We intended to produce an article, but we lost interest after research I did proved the "interesting item" from another state was not the same man as the person in the two main states. The two of us used delicious to handle various online content items the other researcher would want to see. We used a common tag for our project. We could see items in each other's feed.

Delicious also has the ability to make a link "private" where only the person bookmarking the link sees it.

Other social bookmarking sites, such as Diigo, exist. Pinboard, which used to be free, now charges an annual fee for their service. I have not updated my Diigo account for several years although I visit it from time to time. I'm sure that my Pinboard bookmarks disappeared when I failed to pay the annual fee. Delicious is my favorite, especially with its new look and feel.

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