e-wot?

I’m in love. I <3 Delicious. mmm.

It’s been three days, and I’m already settling down into a very sweet relationship with Delicious. I’m slow, I know Delicious has been around a while. And I know I’m not the first… But it took me a long time to get away from the traditional idea of keeping all my bookmarks saved on my computer – computers (plural) that is. That’s me, a traditional guy (with too many collections of bookmarks on too many computers).

But I’ve been around a bit, experimenting with other ways to sync my bookmarks. I tried syncing my bookmarks with Bookmarks Synchroniser (predictably, I guess), but that went all crazy and I finally had to end it. Foxmarks was fun for a while but didn’t quite have what I was looking for. I even tried Furl (blush). All along I knew about Delicious, but somehow we didn’t ‘click’. Maybe the timing wasn’t right, our stars weren’t aligned (or something).

And then one day I was playing with Google Chrome and getting annoyed at how I couldn’t search my bookmarks as I was used to doing in Firefox. Then it dawned on me that Google didn’t want Chrome to be like Firefox, they wanted us to use the ‘cloud’ and online apps an’ stuff. They probably want us to use Google Bookmarks, pfff. Well, I took a look at Google Bookmarks and compared them with Delicious and then it clicked. Oooh, Delicious. You so fine.

And the finest thing about Delicious for me? The Delicious addon for Firefox and IE7. It’s awesome.

So now I’ve combined my home, work and other saved bookmarks into one, and they’re all on Delicious , and all in all my sidebars, on all my computers, all the time. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.

When I ‘Ctrl D’ to save a bookmark, up pops the Delicious prompt suggesting tags to categorise the link. Easy peasy.

It’s too good to be true. I’m waiting for the honeymoon period to wear off. But until it does, I’ll shout it from the rooftops. I <3 Delicious .

YMMV but Delicious wins, Foxmarks comes second, Ma.gnolia third and Google bookmarks gets lapped several times before retiring from the race. Foxmarks? Not in the title above, I know, and it’s not an online bookmarking tool like the others, I know that too. But it’s good and worth a mention.

Why do I rate Google bookmarks so low? Well simply because Google released Chrome without support for Google Bookmarks. This is bad because in my view Chrome handles bookmarks appallingly, and given Chrome’s online app focus, a strong Google Bookmarks would have fixed Chrome’s shortcomings. Bad timing I reckon. Ivan’s blog also makes the point that Google has so many apps in development that their online bookmarks offer is bound to get neglected (compared with Delicious). Everything Google has is ‘Beta’, even Gmail. Yeah, right.

Ma.gnolia is the new kid on the block. Very pretty interface. Does pretty much what Delicious does, but I agree with these guys and PARAgiraffe for the moment.

Foxmarks now. This has got very good since they introduced favicon support. It was good before, but I reckon it’s got much better with favicon sync. Before Foxmarks I used Torisugari’s Bookmarks synchronizer, back in the day. But I switched to Foxmarks when Torisugari slowed down on updates. I rely on favicons in my bookmarks toolbar to find my most used links. I can click and go. Here’s a screenshot which I hope will show you what I mean:

Delicious wins for me mainly because it’s simple and effective. Also as Ivan’s blog mentions, it has a healthy business focus: it’s the only thing they do, so they’re committed. Another point in favour of Delicious is that our partners in local schools here in Singapore are using it. There’s also an excellent Delicious Firefox addon. The only gripe I have about this addon is that it takes up quite a lot of space on my NT profile at work – I had to delete this addon since Firefox 3 came out because I couldn’t log out: my profile was too big.

I’ve started a revolutionary move away from IE6 towards using Firefox at our school, but if our IT infrastructure won’t handle the Delicious Firefox addon we might have to do without it. I reckon we’ll manage ok. Here’s what ours looks like so far:

Apart from showing our teachers how great Firefox is, I’m also going to have to persuade them to start using Delicious in their teaching practice. I’m not sure these people know how to make the most of their bookmarks anyway, but that’s another story.

Innova Junior College seem to have the right idea though:

On the subject of how bad Internet Explorer 6 is… check out IE Death March just for fun.

Billy Tan and Karen Yap from Innova Junior College showed us the results of some action research they’ve done into how they used the online social bookmarking tool Delicious with teachers and for students.

Billy Tan explained how he’d been testing out Delicious with his General Paper students to help them make connections between issues and motivate them to read more. He showed how students, who had set up their own Delicious accounts, had made connections between different issues within one article by assigning multiple tags to individual articles.

Their exit survey showed that 90% of students liked using it. They found that was an easy and effective way to manage and share online information – all you need is internet access, a browser and to remember your login and password.

Among teachers, their results showed that Delicious allowed colleagues to easily archive and share online resources. Karen Yap showed how tagging makes it easy for teachers to retrieve and organise online information. Their exit survey for these teachers showed that 100% agreed that Delicious is good for sharing, 75% of which strongly agreed.

I asked if they’d had any problems with people tagging this differently or mis-tagging. They said they had. To deal with this they recommended that users agree on how to name tags before setting up a Delicious project to avoid mis-tagging. They added that standardising account names is also a good idea.

Individual or Department Delicious accounts? Both speakers agreed that personal accounts were the best option.

Click to download their presentation from ICTLT.

They also handed out a DVD made by Innova JC called ‘What is New Media?’ which showcases the great stuff they’re doing.

Innova Junior College is the Centre of Excellence for New Media and New Media Arts.