Conclusion
While del.icio.us' search features might not be quite as user-friendly as we'd like, its ability to network classes and collect and purpose human attention makes it a powerful pedagogical (and scholarly) tool, providing a kind of tourist information center for the information superhighway.
Pointing to the third-party software and extensions available for del.icio.us seems like the proper way to conclude a Freeware / Web 2.0-inspired review. Sharing source code makes it easy for talented developers to improve and expand del.icio.us' usability. Those who enjoy del.icio.us will likely find some useful tools in their recommended third-party software. Here are a few stand-outs:
- cloudalicious is a personal favorite, since, like Google Trends, it allows you to track the history of a web page. In this case, you can see how del.icio.us users have tagged a URL over time.
- similicio.us is a great search engine that uses del.icio.us tags to suggest websites similiar to the one you input. The author admits that the engine only currently works for fairly popular URLs, but as del.icio.us grows, the engine's usability should increase.
- del.icio.us Soup is a cool visualization software that allows you to see relationships between your tags. You've got to have a pretty good collection of tags before this one will have any "wow" factor.
- newsmasher and googlicious are two outstanding greasemonkey scripts (user-generated javascripts). The former creates a dialogue box on any page that allows you to see del.icio.us user comments for that page. The latter displays del.icio.us search results alongside any Google search. Both scripts will require Greasemonkey extensions- here are some simple directions for installing Greasemonkey for Firefox or for Safari. Greasemonkey extensions do not work with Internet Explorer.
The internet is a big place. Please send anything I might have missed (or questions and comments) to insignificantwrangler at gmail dot com. Or just send me a link on del.icio.us.
About this Site and Thank-Yous
This webtext was constructed using Nvu (xhtml) and Gimp (png)— two open-source, free-ware softwares. It has been coded according to w3c standards for semantic xhtml 1.0 and css 2.1 and according to WCAG-Samurai standards for accessibility. Special thanks to Jenny Bay for turning me onto to del.icio.us and to Jeremy Tirrell for posting great links.
References
Anderson, Chris. (2006) The Long Tail / Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.
del.icio.us. "What is del.icio.us?" Retrieved February 25th, 2008, from the del.icio.us website: http://del.icio.us/about/#What_is_social_bookmarking
Surowiecki, James. (2004) The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Random House.