First I will quote what a 'tag' is, using wikipedia. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an internet bookmark, digital image, or computer file)'. If you would like to find out more about tags then this link will bring you to the wikipedia page about tags.
Tagging a photo allows people to search for an image that they thing would be represented by a particular word and would come up with related searches. Well, Delicious does the same, except that instead of images, you have web sites and u have all the possible tags listed down in a column.
First, some history of Delicious. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but just 2 years later was bought by Yahoo on 9th December 2005 for approximately 15-30,000,000 (US) dollars. It has over 5 million users, and is one of the most popular social bookmarking services. Some people say its essential, others say that it is simple and useful.
Delicious allows you to store your bookmarks and tag them, while sharing them with friends and colleagues. This makes this not only useful and academic, but fun and social. However there are some advantages and disadvantages of Delicious.
First the advantages: Delicious is very easy to use, and you don't have to have a great knowledge of computers to use it. It can also save useful links that you could forget. It can also be accessed on any computer with internet connection in the world. However, some disadvantages are that it requires online connection, and when someone tags they could be thinking only about themselves and not of what others might tag it as if they were to search for a particular site.
Overall, I would say that Delicious is a great website that can be accessed anywhere in the world and is useful, simple and fun. I, along 5,000,000 others, would recommend most people, whether good with computers or not, to join now for free and try it out.
This is OK.
ReplyDeleteYou describe quite well what tags are, but not really how they are useful for organising information. You touch on the social side of delicious, but not really how it allows you access to your bookmarks from multiple machines. Towards the end you also mention that one of the big disadvantages of bookmarking websites with delicious is that you need an internet connection. I hope you see why this is quite amusing!
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