It's a web-based social bookmarking system, i.e., you save your bookmarks to your delicious page rather than to your computer, making it as portable as your Internet access. It also allows you to organize your bookmarks by tags. The bookmarking process can be facilitated by a browser plug-in that makes it very easy to save links and tag them, and delicious automatically provides suggested and popular tags to choose from. Other people can browse your delicious bookmarks, hence the "social" aspect, though what you make publicly available is up to you. Furthermore, the links that you can discover by searching delicious are often of a higher quality than those you might find via google, because the results have been hand-selected by users, rather than found by algorithm.
I am a big fan of Delicious for academic reasons: I believe that the delicious model represents the apotheosis of user-generated natural language search, and I think it has the potential to make controlled vocabularies and expert-created classification systems obsolete. Because an enormous community of delicious users collectively determine the tags that are associated with links, the language that describes the link is what real people will use to search, and the tags are flexible and can easily change their meaning over time, depending on how the community assigns tags. Unlike, say, the Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are essentially fixed and become outdated and may not even represent how people really search. See how awesome the Delicious model can be if its applied to books instead of links? This is what LibraryThing does, and I totally think it's the future of library science.
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Date: 2009-01-15 04:30 am (UTC)I am a big fan of Delicious for academic reasons: I believe that the delicious model represents the apotheosis of user-generated natural language search, and I think it has the potential to make controlled vocabularies and expert-created classification systems obsolete. Because an enormous community of delicious users collectively determine the tags that are associated with links, the language that describes the link is what real people will use to search, and the tags are flexible and can easily change their meaning over time, depending on how the community assigns tags. Unlike, say, the Library of Congress Subject Headings, which are essentially fixed and become outdated and may not even represent how people really search. See how awesome the Delicious model can be if its applied to books instead of links? This is what LibraryThing does, and I totally think it's the future of library science.