With the help of a blogpost by Dorine Ruter it is easy to put up a short introduction to del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site that we are using to collectively gather websites, wikis, blogs and other online resources with interesting content about knowledge management in the context of development cooperation. We have chosen delicious because it is used by a large number of people, but have found out it is not so intuitive for everyone, so if you are new to delicious, it may take some time to get used to it.

But what is social bookmarking in the first place? Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public website and ‘tagging’ them with keywords, meaning you add information about the content. The tagging allows you to find your resources lateron, but also to follow other people’s resources with the same tag.  If you like to know more: here are some good starter resources.

Del.icio.us basics

• http://del.icio.us – The del.icio.us website
• http://del.icio.us/help/ – Useful start-up information
• Del.icio.us cheat sheet – Explanation of del.icio.us by Beth Kanter
• Seven things you should know about social bookmarking – Introduction on social bookmarking in general
• http://slackermanager.com/2005/12/the_several_hab.html - the several habits of wildly successful delicious users with good tips for starting delicious users
• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5508.cfm- 13 tips for effective tagging

Examples of del.icio.us users

• http://del.icio.us/joitske – Joitske Hulsebosch’s links on Communities of Practice, ICT4DEV / KM4DEV and online interaction
• http://del.icio.us/choconancy – Nancy White on online interaction and facilitation (tools and processes)
• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter – My own links on KM4DEV and online interaction

Examples of how del.icio.us is used by other development organisations or individuals

• http://del.icio.us/euforic – Use of del.icio.us within an organization / network
• http://euforic.org (click on RSS feeds) – Example of tag display (at bottom of page)
• http://www.iaald.org – Example of most recent bookmarks displayed elsewhere via an RSS feed
• http://www.km4dev.suprglu.com – Combined feeds of 6 people joining in a KM4DEV tagging experiment
• http://joitskehulsebosch.blogspot.com – Joitske’s weblog with the npk4dev resources via the feed in the sidebar
• http://www.r-mail.org/ – Tool (one of many) to keep track of new items via e-mail
• http://del.icio.us/dorineruter/bookmarking – Some of my bookmarks of del.icio.us related tools, to use once you have gotten to know del.icio.us

Learning more about delicious

• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ydn-delicious/ - A yahoo group about delicious
• http://socialsourcecommons.org/tool/show/67/support - for more links about delicious
• http://www.twoantennas.com/projects/delicious-network-explorer/- to explore your own delicious network
• http://www.ivy.fr/revealicious/index.html - for visual representations of tags
• http://tagcrowd.com/ - to create a tagcloud
• http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations - more visualizations, including on the taggers
• http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/page5719.cfmm – tips for tidying tags
• http://www.econsultant.com/delicious-by-function/index.html - delicious from A to Z
• http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/browse/visualizations - example of nptech tag visualization (don’t ask me how they did it!)

And here’s a presentation from Beth Kanter about tagging for knowledge sharing:

Several people started bookmarking online resources related to knowledge management for development. To make each other aware of possibly valuable resources and to collectively build a public, searchable set of these resources, a few members of the KM4DEV community started a small initiative. They are bookmarking the resources they want to collect and share via del.icio.us, tagging the items ‘npk4dev’. When you subscribe to the npk4dev tag (link / rss), you can monitor everyone’s contributions. By capturing the RSS feed in Suprglu (link / rss) a list of searchable resources is built.
You are welcome to join the initiative and help us collect and share your online bookmarks! Please read some guidelines on how to contribute in the following paragraph.

npk4dev tagging – guidelines & resources