Week 8: Delicious - and mostly tasteful.

As with some of the web.2 tools it's taken me awhile to get the point of Delicious. I've transferred my work Favourites to my Delicious account. My Favourites folders are quite well organised, so I wondered what I would gain from having tags etc. What I've worked out is:
1. At least my Favourites are now saved in another place. My work computer once crashed and for some reason my Favourites list wasn't backed up on the server, so I had to start all over again.
2. Sometimes I can't decide which folder is the best one to file an URL in ...a few could be applicable but it seems that in Explorer you can only save an URL once and not in multiple folders. This is where the tags are really useful in Delicious.
3. Delicious can be used like a filtered Google search. The websites that are included in Delicious are ones that other people think are worth visiting and therefore you can cut down on the amount of sites you have to wade through.
4. I have set up an RSS feed from a search I did on a genetic syndrome that I'm gathering information on, so this will alert me if other people having a like interest add a new site to their bookmarks.
5. I like the concept of bundling together tags on a website and I plan to organise this for my library clients when our new website at work gets up.
So this is something that I shall use, but the thought of going through all my Favourites and adding tags for each site is a little daunting. Still, using other people's tags as a basis will make it somewhat easier. Times have really changed since the strict rules of forming correct, hierarchical and consistent subject headings...now we can just use "cool" descriptors like "fun.stuff". How I will miss "Recreation - mental exercises".