BenBishop.me.uk

This is part I of a II part guide to making the most of Delicious, the social bookmarking service.  Part I is intended as a ‘Getting Started’ or a ‘Beginners Guide’ to Delicious, pitched at the user who has never heard of Delicious or has just signed up (its free). Part II will follow, though a continuation, it is aimed at the more experienced web user who’s interested in developing the way they use Delicious to make the most of this excellent service and the extras that have been made available.

“Del.icio.us?… Social Bookmarking?… pfft! What’s all the fuss about?”

Started in 2004 by Joshua Schachter, Delicious is one of the original web services that started the now clichéd term, Web2.0. More recently Yahoo has continued its run of hot acquisitions with its purchase of Delicious and, like its brethren Flickr before, will only benefit from the infrastructure and knowledge that Yahoo brings to the table.

Most of us are familiar with the concept of bookmarking sites we like and would like to come back to (I doubt you’d be reading this now if you’re not!). The main problem of this is many of us use more than one computer in our daily lives and keeping these sets of bookmarks synchronised can be a bit of a nightmare. This is often the most immediate benefit to users of Delicious, which in its simplest guise is an online bookmark or favourite’s manager that allows you to access the bookmarks of sites you like from anywhere with an internet connection.  At its most compelling level though, Delicious is an eclectic social mix of peoples browsing habits that could be considered the finest internet directory on the planet.

Delicious is probably best summed up with the points from the ‘About’ section on their site.

·         Keep links to your favourite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on Delicious and access them from any computer on the web.

·         Share favourites with friends, family, and colleagues.

·         Discover new things. Everything on Delicious is someone’s favourite – they’ve already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

Popularity breeds imitation of course and Delicious is not the only social bookmarking service available. Open source clones have sprung up and many competitors have arrived on the back of its success. One such competitor which expands on the features is Spurl.net, though Delicious remains popular by offering the right features and a simplicity essential for this kind of service.

Sign Me Up!

When you first access the site, the home page offers you a quick overview of Delicious and what’s popular on the web at the moment. Signing up to Delicious is through a simple form which at the time of writing is available on the front page on the right hand side. Alternatively click on the register icon in the top right hand corner of the page.

Post that Page

Browser Buttons

Once you have signed up, the process takes you immediately to the ‘Browser Buttons’ page. This is the page that allows you to choose your method of adding your favourites to Delicious. and in turn getting access to them at a later date. The first suggestion is adding links to your bookmarks toolbar in Firefox, your Links toolbar in IE or your personal toolbar in Opera. Doing this it gives you two buttons or shortcuts; one to ‘My Del.icio.us’, your collection of favourites and the other, ‘Post to Del.icio.us’ is the shortcut to add your favourites in the first place.

Firefox Extension

This method is a little cumbersome though and alternatives to this are available. If you use Firefox, and why wouldn’t you, you can take advantage of one of the many powerful extensions available. The Delicious Firefox Extension is available from the help option found on any page in Delicious. Click ‘Help’ then under ‘Browser Buttons’ you will see ‘Firefox Extension’. Clicking on this link will take you to a help page that gives you instructions on how to install this extension but anyone who has installed an extension before will be familiar with this process.

The Firefox Delicious extension adds browser integration to the Delicious service by making much of the excellent functionality available from within Firefox. Firstly it frees up the two shortcuts that you may have already created in your bookmarks toolbar and adds them as buttons to you browser. Adding a Delicious menu option to Firefox the enables you to do the basics from within a menu which in turn adds keyboard shortcuts. For example, using the ‘Alt+.+T’ shortcut brings up the ‘Post to Delicious’ page from the page you are currently browsing.

Further integration occurs with the context menu when you right click. Providing the same functionality as ‘Post to Delicious’, right-click on a link and you get a ‘Tag this Link’ menu option, right click elsewhere on a page and you get a ‘Tag this Page’ option.

Tagging? That’s not illegal is it? 

Tagging is the process of adding keywords or ‘tags’ to an object to benefit the retrieval in a search at a later date (you remember I talked about the social and directory like aspect to Delicious?). It is difficult to immediately understand the advantages of tagging objects whether they are photos in Flickr’s case (see my how to) or bookmarks where Delicious is concerned but hopefully it won’t take long for it to become apparent.

With Delicious, tagging involves adding keywords to your bookmarks that you would use to help retrieve them in the future. Examples tend to be the easiest way of understanding this.

Take http://www.google.com a site that we could all name from the bookmarks inside our head but it is a good example in this case. Terms such as search google search_engine are tags that you could add to this bookmark. Others could include daily images news internet web and tools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/ Tags: reference encyclopaedia wiki wikipedia information

http://espn.go.com Tags: sports news espn daily scores football

The great thing about tagging is that the only disadvantage to over doing it is the time you might waste thinking about it. The general rule of thumb to aim for is around six but anything up to double figures is fine as you pick it up. The more you get used to the concept, the more refined you will become with your tagging and the relevancy will increase. The relevancy is where the social side to this bookmarking comes in.

Go ahead and click on the ‘Post to Delicious’ button on your toolbar (or the Tag icon if you’ve installed the Firefox extension). One of two things will happen depending on your browser or method; either a small browser window will pop up or your page will move to the post page at Delicious.

Here you can see the form that appears confirming the page that you want to add to your favourites. With the address and description of the site you can also add some notes to the bookmark if you wish. At the bottom you will see the recommended and popular tags for this favourite and this is the first part of the social aspect of Delicious. Clicking on these tags adds them to the tags box on the form though you can type in your own if you prefer. These tags are based on other user’s bookmarks and the tags they used when adding this site to their favourites. You don’t have to use these tags but it is likely that one or more may seem relevant and it’s a good way to start building your online favourites collection. Clicking the Save button when your done, adds this favourite to your Delicious account and returns you to your previous page.

What was that Page Again?

Access to your favourites is available at any time by clicking on the ‘My Delicious’ shortcut on your toolbar (or the Delicious icon if you’ve installed the Firefox extension).

Your page is split by default into three areas, beginning with the header section which contains your name, some navigational links (you can click on the ‘your bookmarks’ link from any page on Delicious to access them) and a search box. Your favourites are listed chronologically as links, most recent 10 first in the main part of the page and your tags are listed alphabetically on the right hand column.

The two main methods of retrieving your favourites from within Delicious are in fact very similar. Firstly the graphical representation, on the right hand side of the page there is a list of all the tags you have used when adding your favourites to Delicious. Clicking on one of these tags logically refines the list of favourites on the left to include just the ones tagged with this term. This opens up another tag list, a sub tag list if you like, that allows you to improve further the selection process. At this point clicking on the ‘+’ link allows you to view the list of your favourites that now contains both tags. Improving this selection further can be achieved by adding different tags using the techniques just described.

Second and perhaps more conveniently, you can search by tag through the search box at the top. Any combination of tags can be used in Delicious by using the ‘+’ sign to separate them. Using our example of ESPN from earlier entering the tag sports returns may return many results but refining the search by using multiple tags such as sports+espn is likely to bring up the site at the top of the list.

You have probably noticed the two different sets of results that are available from the search facility in Delicious labelled ‘Your Items’ and ‘Everyone’s Items’. This introduces the community aspect to Delicious and is what makes this such a valuable service.

Go ahead and start searching. Try combining some of your most popular tags for terms and see what you can find. Part of the brilliance of Delicious and no doubt what attracted Yahoo to it, is the personalised search results. Delicious’s relevance will increase in value as more people use it and further integration into Yahoo’s search results seems inevitable, though I’ll be happy to see it.

Building Communities

Sharing and the ’social’ aspect of Delicious is the defining aspect of this excellent service. Designed from the ground up as a way of making your favourites available to your friends and family, provides the ability to share and find your bookmarks easily. Provide people with your user name and they can immediately access your favourites by the address bar. Click on the link below to have a look at mine

http://del.icio.us/bbish007

Simply replace my username (bbish007) with any one from your friends and family to instantly view what they have recently added. 

I’m Sold

Well if your not, you should be! Delicious is still a relatively young service but its one that has grown significantly over the last 12 months. With its future and quality of service secured by the Yahoo acquisition, Delicious is a compelling and addictive social bookmarking package that is here to stay.

What’s coming in Part II?

·         Making the most of the Interface

·         Using the RSS Feeds

·         Your Inbox

·         Getting Tagging down to a fine art

·         Make use of the best implementations of the API

If there is anything else you want to see in the next part let me know.