A Delicious Idea

The media is a buzz these days about Social media. So, I’m going to try and
offer some guidance about one of the new tools. Seth Godin says one of the prime responsibilities of a leader is to make it easier for followers to communicate with one another; to tighten up the tribe so to speak. Delicious
is a cool tool for allowing people to manage their own information and to share their “library” with one another.

I’ve heard the Internet and the World Wide Web described as many things over the years. The one that has stuck with me is, “The World Wide Web is like the Library of Congress with all of the books thrown onto the lobby floor and no card catalog.”

That’s what makes Delicious, so delicious. Among other things; it’s the missing card catalog.

Delicious is a self-proclaimed “social bookmarking service that allows you to tag, save, manage and share Web pages all in one place. With emphasis on the power of the community, Delicious greatly improves how people discover, remember and share on the Internet”.

Delicious has four main components: Bookmarks, People, Tags and Search.

It uses Bookmarks to archive information just like your web browser.

It has a People section, like Facebook. It’s called your Network and it’s a people aggregator. It allows you to see what people you respect feel is important and provides a venue for you to share what you think is important.

It allows you to Tag articles. This is the card catalog feature. You get to attach multiple designations or categories to individual articles.

Then there’s the Search engine which allows you to search the articles you’ve tagged, those tagged by the people in your network as well as those articles tagged by everyone who uses Delicious.

When I decided I wanted to write about this I searched “Delicious” and over 9,000 articles appeared. That wasn’t helpful. So, I added “useful” to my search and the results were narrowed down to just over 2,000 articles. Now I could have continued refining my search, but after a quick scan I found an article that interested me on the first screen.

Now, there is no such thing as a free lunch. It will take a few minutes to set up your account and a little trial and error reading the very helpful Help section, but the payoff is well worth the investment. I’m sure there will be additional big things coming along any day, but in the here and now; Delicious is our flavor de jour. You can find us on Delicious at http://delicious.com/Mindspot or by clicking on the Delicious badge to the right.