I Think I've Become a Slacker...Oh Well

Holy smokes...it's Monday afternoon and I'm not done my homework for last week. I think I have become a slacker! Oh well, I'll deal with that next week. Oh wait, that's this week!

Social bookmarking is an entirely new venture for me. I've been noticing this funny little name...del.ici.ous...around on websites for some time but never really new what it was for. Now I understand, or at least am starting to.

Activity #1: Searching

To conduct a search to compare Delicious and Google I had to come up with a topic. Wow...all of the internet at my fingertips and what did I come up with? Nothin'. OK, so what might stump either of these two systems? Ahhh, epipheny! Ask about one of my research topics! They're obscure and unpopular. Perfect! I chose the keyword "turbulence". Results? Delicious returned a handful of interesting stuff, but nothing fantastic. And what about Google you may ask? 12.1 million hits. First thing that comes to my mind is that if I narrow the search any more on Delicious I will be out of hits in no time. In Google, if I don't narrow the search, my time on the planet will run out. Interesting dichotomy.

Now to let you in on the secret. In the context of the research community, this is a actually a very broad and generic term. I searched this word on purpose to see what these systems would return. I know that searching "turbulence" on Google is going to turn up a bunch of hits, lots of them useless to me. The main reason for this is that the term is commonly used in explaining political fallout, etc. Delicious, however, returned mostly, though only a few, things that were somewhat relevant to what I was looking for. In defense of Delicious, the community that would be using it and ALSO doing research in turbulence is probably quite small. Hence, the number of tagged pages would be small as well. End result? I think Delicious will be useful for topics that have a sufficiently large audience. OK, enough already. I'm late and a slacker remember? No need to embellish any further.

Activities #2 and 3

So next, like a good student following his directions, I signed up for an account on Delicious. To spare you some reading (and honestly some writing), here's a summary of my feelings:

• I'm an Engineer and talking about my feelings is not my strong point. Just kidding...I couldn't resist, true or not!
• Tags make searching better because of the tags are added by the public, not the author
• Because real people bookmark them, the sites are probably good/useful
• Because there are so many users on the internet, you can get a "large sample" of what people think about a site with regards to its relevance (provided the topic is not too narrow)
• I like how tags are automatically added when I add a site and the ability to add my own as well as a note
• I REALLY like the portability of my bookmarks. I am relatively mobile between my laptop and iPod but this is a huge advantage for students who must move between school and personal computers

What's Next?

So far, and I have only been thinking about this for a few days, I have come up with one really useful way to use Delicious for teaching. Because I can tag sites and then publicize that group of tags (I haven't sorted out the details but apparently I can) I can make a group of "Useful links for ENGG1013", or any other course(s), that I can add to any webpage. Then, and here's the really cool part, as I add links to that group in Delicious, they will automatically update where I've put the links in my course! No running back and forth...Delicious does all of the work. I'll blog the how-to when I get it figured out.

Well, I'm sure you're all tired of reading this post by now. I would be remiss, however, if I did not send out a big thanks to my two biggest fans: Sue Davis and Newfie Girl who read and comment on this blog everytime I post. I'll be sure to drop a couple of autographed headshots in the mail for you both.

Bye for now and thanks for reading.