Delicious may very well be the single most effective utility for finding and sharing resources on the web.  Stated simply, Delicious is public bookmarking service.  Once you’ve created an account on Delcious and installed a Firefox plugin, you save your bookmarks to the web instead of your browser.  This comes in very handy if you use more than one computer, which most of us do.  Although, that’s really just the tip of the iceberg to get people started.  The real power comes with tagging and networking functions.

Let’s start with the tagging.  Most of you have probably “tagged” something at some point.  It’s basically attaching a keyword to something so you can find it later.  By tagging your bookmarks, you’re organizing them according to your own metadata instead of just one long list.  You can then find bookmarks by keyword which are often displayed in a tag cloud.  You can take a look at my tag cloud to get an idea of how this works.

Where Delicious really shines is in its ability to connect people with unique interests and their web resources.  The first way is to simply add your friends and colleagues to your network.  This way you can all see each others bookmarks.  However, ou can also see the bookmarks of the people who have saved certain websites or used certain tags.  Let’s say you’re interested in Cervantes and digital presentation.  You can tag the Cervantes Project with Delicious, then click on the number of people who have the same bookmark and view their sites on Delicious.

Hopefully, I’ve convinced, but if this sounds interesting but a little confusing, take a look at this video by Common Craft on Social Bookmarking.