By Ellyn Angelotti
Interactivity Editor and adjunct faculty
What is del.icio.us?It's a social bookmarking site that enables users to share sites they've bookmarked on the Web with other users. Here's more of an explanation of the del.icio.us bookmarking process from an
article I wrote about social bookmarking for Poynter Online earlier this year:
Tagging allows you to group your links by
topic, the way you might add folders to your file cabinet -- but you can
put content
in more than one folder. This practice makes it easy to do things like
plan a vacation, track a niche area of coverage or collaborate with
coworkers by sharing links useful to the group.
Using del.icio.us, users
create their own URL. Your homepage serves as the home to your links,
your friends' links and links chosen by your "fans." A fan is someone
who subscribes to a feed of your links.
You could, for example, add Poynter to your del.icio.us network.
We use our del.icio.us page to compile journalism resources or links we find useful to our readers. For example to
find resources we've found about social networking and journalism you can navigate by clicking on the "social networking" tag on from Poynter's del.icio.us home page or by typing the intuitive URL http://del.icio.us/poynter/social_networking -- automatically created when you create each category.
We've also used it for Poynter seminars and meetings. For example, check out
links that Poynter staff and faculty have discussed at our regular Tech Talks where we discuss the latest and greatest gadgets and Web sites.
How could news organizations use del.icio.us? To supplement your existing coverage. For example, say your news organization covers the Miami Dolphins. When you find links on the Web related to the Dolphins, you could post it to your news organization's del.icio.us page and tag it miami_dolphins or dolphins. The tag will create a separate page that you can link to from your site, or subscribe to the RSS feed for that page and it will automatically update the content and refresh it each time you add something new.
So how do you build your own del.icio.us page?1. Go to del.icio.us.
2. Click "Get started."
3. Create a username. This will be what your page is titled. For example, our username is poynter.
4. Fill out the rest of the form: Password, security word, etc.
5. Click register.
6. Now it will give you the option to add extensions or bookmarklets to your Web browser window. You can bypass this step but it makes it easier to post a story because a toolbar will remain on your browser at all times.
7. Verify the email del.icio.us sends to the e-mail account you register.
8. To see your page, type del.icio.us/ and then your username.
i.e. http://del.icio.us/poynter
9. To post a link click the "post" link on your del.icio.us page or go to http://del.icio.us/post
10. When you post a link, you will need the URL, a description, any notes you want to make about the link and tags.
11. Click "Save" and you've bookmarked your link successfully to your del.icio.us page.
Your thoughts about del.icio.us?Please your responses to the feedback section:
Have you used this application/tool before?
How would you implement this tool in your site?
How might Poynter best put this tool to use?
How could you use this tool to do better journalism?
