The effectiveness of Delicious

It has been at least 12 months since I have viewed my Delicious account. It was first introduced to me by an IT savvy librarian three years ago who sang its praises. What a pleasant surprise it was to view this visually pared back site, considering I have been looking and ‘liking’ around the advert frequent Facebook community site. 

First impressions first, Delicious is essentially targeting users to save their personal and favourite bookmarks, and (for me) the sharing aspect is secondary. The interface is simple and very easy to navigate for long absent account holders (I have been a bloglovin user these past years).  Porter (2006) blogs, that “we naturally gravitate toward software with a single purpose because it is easier to remember and we know exactly what we’re doing when we’re using it.”  

Apart from being of a single value to personal users, Delicious is the new flexible taxonomy or folksonomy. This folksonomy promotes the development of communities around the common interest of the resources tagged.  For organisational use the positive features are:

·         Using the interpretation and vernacular of its users or organisational acronyms and buzz words to bring that content into ascendency. 

·         The tagged content descriptions can then be continuously upgraded creating a hierarchy by users providing richer information and searching ability. 

·         The ability for each user or group to personalise their own descriptions.

·         For an organisation with a large list of tags users can quickly find their tag of interest using the clearly placed search bar.

·         Organisational security, segregating public and private tags.

·         Promoting each user's knowledge bank to add to the growing knowledge base

A critical analysis of this site would be the lack of a description box that appears when the mouse runs over tab headings.  Also the name change from ‘stacks’ to ‘tag’ has been a little confusing when previous users still refer to the old label, especially when they don’t really share the same meaning.

Reference:

Porter, J. (2006). The Del.icio.us lesson. Retrieved from http://bokardo.com/archives/the-delicious-lesson/