Delicious : searching URL's and exploring tags

As part of our Library's '23 Things' staff training course I had to trawl up access to the Delicious account that I set up about five years ago. Some things you try and they stick and others you try and instantly forget about. I'm afraid Delicious was not one of those things that stuck, but it is interesting to see the things I tagged then: my husband's blog (now long expired: blogs were obviously one of those things that did not stick for him,) and various keen looking (but quite boring) librarian sites. It seems I never used Delicious to search for articles on Dionysius Lardner, my personal non work related research area, which is much more exciting.

I used "exploring tags" to see who else had linked to Lardner: several people but their articles were most often about Ring Lardner, author of Mash (it is always a delight to trip over the excellent Ring, or the American journalist Richard Lardner whenever I am searching for Dionysius.) I was confused by not being able to link two words "Dionysius" and "lardner" : the software handled these as separate links. I expect there are ways to do this.

It was easier just to put "Dionysius Lardner" in the general search box and that brought up one user who had linked to his Wikipedia biog: he could be a useful contact I expect.

I discovered you could also look up a URL and see who else had linked to this so I looked to see if any Delicious users had linked to my Lardner site but sadly no. I checked to see if anyone had linked to this blog and I was glad to see that one user called Hugh has a link (hello Hugh!) I looked to see what else Hugh was interested in and could see he liked Wordle and other things. I conclude this could be useful for finding collaborators and following their links. I saw that an impressive 93 users had linked to my friend, Internet guru Andrew Odlyzko's site. when I looked at the tag names that people had invented for the link most of them were totally useless to anyone else: they included "research" "data" and "technology" which make me realise the advantages of using authorised language for subject classification.

I tried bookmarking a site myself. I chose my own Lardner site of course, http://annaarmstrongmartin.books.officelive.com/default.aspx. and tagged it 'Lardner'.

I filled in my profile info so that people could see who I am if they want to contact me about Lardner (or anything else.)(I go by the catchy handle of AnnaMartin if anyone wants to look me up on Delicious.)

When working on my book I do organise links to many sites but I use Zotero because I have Zotero open all the time anyway so that I can reference citations. I don't think you can share links with other Zotero users the way you can with Delicious and Mendeley so from that point of view Delicious is quite good. I am not that interested in networking anyway: I have my address on various internet sites and people can contact me there if they want to collaborate, similarly I just contact specialists if I am interested in their articles: it is not hard to find collaborators.