Del.icio.us, another cool tool

Please forgive the pun, but Delicious is an acquired taste.

Delicious, at http://del.icio.us or http://delicious.com, is a social bookmarking tool–and if you don’t already know what means and why you might be interested in using one, the term “social bookmarking” probably tells you exactly nothing, but social bookmarking means you can save, organize, and share your bookmarks.

Saving:  I’d heard people talking about social bookmarking for a couple of years before I started to understand why anyone would be interested in sharing bookmarks.  However, I found myself about a year and a half back having to do work on several different computers from one day to the next (like many college instructors and students).  I had tons of useful websites bookmarked in my Firefox and Internet Explorer folders at home, which didn’t do me any good when I wanted to show that Jon Stewart video in class. So I finally created an account at http://del.icio.us, and imported the bookmarks from my computers, which I could then find easily wherever I could log into my del.icio.us account.

Importing my bookmarks was easy, but what I have to admit was really time-consuming was going through them all to mark which ones I wanted to keep private and which could be public in my del.icio.us account.  That was a bit of a time-sink, so I recommend making all the bookmarks private by default, so you can return at your leisure to decide which ones you want to share with others.

Sharing: The part I find really cool about being able to share bookmarks is that I can go look at what other people are bookmarking. If there’s an author I really admire, like Clay Shirky, I can look to see if he has a del.icio.us account and public bookmarks…then I get to see what he’s reading and finding noteworthy. (And if you’re also dying to see what Clay Shirky is interested in, go to http://delicious.com/cshirky.) The sharing goes both ways, of course–if you want to see what I’ve tagged a ”cool tool”, you can go to http://delicious.com/mendhamt/cooltools.  You can add other Delicious users to your network, and then your friends, colleagues, or classmates can recommend web pages for you. I’m pretty sold on social bookmarking now, and often recommend it to friends and colleagues.

If you want to read a bit more you can find links to two good blog posts and a video about Delicious at http://delicious.com/mendhamt/delicious, but trying it out yourself is what will really show you what it can do. I’m hoping that faculty, staff, and students at my institution, Franklin Pierce, will use it so we can more easily share resources and interests with each other.

Another Cool Tool: Twitter

Twitter is one of those online tools that is a little hard to explain, but is addictive once you start using it.  It’s a free, web-based tool for microblogging–you can write posts up to 140 characters in length. Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” and Twitter users answer with short, simple answers. Here’s a nice video called “Twitter in Plain English”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o

Who I'm following on Twitter

Like many regular-length blogs, Twitter posts (which are called “tweets”) might be completely boring if you didn’t know the person. Who cares if somebody you don’t know is making a peanut butter sandwich in Akron, Ohio? However, if your best friend is making a spinach sandwich, that’s different, or if a writer whose work you admire is picking plums from a tree in California, that’s kind of fun to know too. If you set up a Twitter account (at http://twitter.com) you can search for people you know by name or location, and click the “Follow” button next to the profiles so that their tweets will automatically show up on your Twitter home page. Many news networks post their headlines in Twitter. I follow two news networks non-US just to get some variety in my news diet (The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera English).

Twitter has become wildly popular among social media geeks as well as other parts of the population.  I really like the capacity to post to Twitter from my cell phone–I can just send a text to the short number 40404. If I’m grading a pile of papers and want to blurt out, “I just graded 62 papers!” to the world at large, I can do so without going to my computer, opening a browser, and so on. And no one has to read it unless they’ve chosen to follow me on Twitter.

I think Twitter might be useful for college students because it allows you to maintain some contact with friends, as you would on Facebook, but it’s less distracting. It’s simple and quick and allows some of that real-time, up-to-the-minute kind of ongoing social contact you might get from an instant messenger service without being so intrusive.  A first-year student might want to reassure her parents that she’s surviving her first semester and studying hard; she could share her Twitter username with your folks and post quick messages like “3 hours at library, then great dinner of tofu stir-fry, pickled beets, and German chocolate cake,” or “B+ on math quiz!” or “My academic advisor looks just like George Clooney.” Of course, the same kind of safety and good sense you need to exercise in any public media are important. If you want to write really personal things, you might want to check the “protect my updates” option so only people you know can read them. Consider using an alias that doesn’t allow people to figure out who you really are, or maintain two profiles, one for your public self, and one that is anonymous.

There aren’t a lot of Twitter users here in Rindge, NH, but I wonder if it might be used productively at Franklin Pierce University students, faculty, and staff.  For instance, what if all of the hundreds of people who must be reading our summer reading program book right now, Three Cups of Tea, were noting their reactions and thoughts as they go through? That could add up to some interesting conversation, a window into the intellectual life of first year students, and a way for us to forge social bonds even before most us arrive on campus in the fall.  If you’re game, sign up for Twitter and follow mendhamt, and I’ll follow your posts, too. Let’s see what happens.