Sunday, February 22, 2009

Delicious Genealogy

I was able to add bookmarks to pages on my Google genealogy group to Delicious. That's nice because the bookmarks allow me to write a description of the file I am referencing.

Tags make it possible to focus on a topic within my bookmarks. For example, If someone wants to see all of my bookmarks that have a tag for the "Yoho" family entering this URL is all it takes.

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/Yoho

You can also search for more than one tag by entering a plus sign (+) between tags. For example: to find all of my bookmarks pointing to the articles about "PDF" written by Dick Eastman use this URL.

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/Eastman+PDF

After trying this URL enter the following line without the word "Eastman" to see the difference. This one finds all of the pages about "PDF."

http://del.icio.us/MrDickie/PDF

This ability to gather all of the links together in one set is very powerful. You could think of the bookmarks of "MrDickie" as a website with pointers to all of the webpages he's either found or posted himself. This website doesn't have a structure, like a tree or organizational chart. Rather the website is dynamic or virtual. The visitor searches for the topic of interest using a tag or tags and Delicious presents a display, similar to a Google search, which gathers all of the pages about the topic of interest together.

There's more to it than I'm writing about here. Once you are at Delicious you will see lists of tags, a place to key in tags, counts of the number of times the tags were used and much more.

If you take a look at what I have done so far I'd appreciate hearing your opinion. Did you find it useful? Was it easy to learn and use?

Mr. Dickie

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