Del.icio.us

I thi.nk that the most us.ef.ul thing I lea.rned from del.icio.us is that i.t is ac.cep.tab.le to in.ser.t mul.ti.ple per.iod..s in.to a w.ord. Not only is this beh.avio.r c..ool, i.t is als.o us.ef.ul. I've ev.en co.nsid.ered inc.luding i.t in an emer.gent l.iter.acy hand.out, or us.ing it in sto.ry.tim.e. Seriously though, I didn't find del.icio.us to be that useful of a site. I don't go home to my computer lab each night and wonder which of my 12 computers has the link I'm looking for, in fact I can't remember the last time I saved a link per.iod. Google does a fine job of searching out which ever site I happen to be looking for and I feel like typing something into the google search bar in firefox is quicker that searching thru a bookmarks folder and it is definitely quicker than logging into del.icio.us and then searching my links for whatever it is I'm looking for.

As far as using del.icio.us to provide reference help, I'm not sure I'm sold. I speculated that google would once again be more effective. So I decided to test this hypothesis, by searching some tags in del.icio.us and then searching those same terms in google. I decided to search nature, orangutans, trees (no I can't explain why I chose those terms, but I did, so now we all have to live w/ them) in del.icio.us and I immediately encountered a drawback to using del.icio.us, I can't spell, therefore, I certainly can't spell orangutans. My attempt ended up looking something like 'oragatang.' Del.icio.us was not impressed, it rewarded my search w/ 0 results and no suggestions on how i might find more. Google on the other hand actually found 31 results that other grievous mispellers of the web had posted and better still google, in it's infinite wisdom, asked me did you mean nature, orangutans, trees ? Yes. Yes I did google. Google then went on to show me some 36,000 sites that matched my criteria. I only looked at the first page, but most of the results looked relevant. I then took the correct spelling google had provided me and offered it to del.icio.us. Del.icio.us gave me one result, something about the origins of walking began in the trees. This was not what I had hoped to find. Google 1, Del.icio.us 0. I, being a kind a generous soul, decided to give deli.cio.us a second chance. Perhaps this one search was a fluke. I decided this time I would have a clearer objective when I searched (my triplet of only somewhat related terms may have been what caused del.icio.us fits). My objective became information on the movies of the 2006 sundance film festival. I phrased my search as: sundance, 2006, movies. Both google and del.icio.us provided me w/ many relevant links right on the first page, however del.cio.us actually provided me w/ the same link 6 times, 6 of the first seven links were to the sundance 2006 official website, which in a way is actually good, that's probably the most relevant site, but on the other hand suggesting it 6 times is a little over the top. Google provided a variety of sites w/ the information on the movies of sundance 2006 and since we're dealing w/ the reviews here I think at least a little bit of variety is important. Google 2, Del.icio.us 0. (Google also found the sundance 2006 official page).

Before I end I should clarify my opinions of del.icio.us. I'm not trying to say del.icio.us is a bad site, or a useless website, on the contrary, it seems to have plenty of great applications, but those applications are either not particularly relevant to my situation or those applications are redundant and my needs are better filled by another website (thanks google!). I should however give credit where credit is due and I must admit I did have one great success w/ del.icio.us. A few weeks ago, when the library 2.0 was still in its testing phase, I was previewing a few of the exercises at home and i decided to give del.icio.us a shot. I searched my favorite nba rumor site in delicious and then used the tags associated w/ it to try to find a similar site, I browsed long and hard and finally I stumbled across a website previously unknown to me http://heylarryhughespleasestoptakingsomanybadshots.com/ it was hillarious and it is updated frequently so I've visit it often since discovering it (thanks del.icio.us!) I can never remember the prohibitively long url though... so I always search larry hughes stop on google and it comes right up.