del.icio.us+-+Getting+Started

= Starting w/ del.icio.us=

A. Creating an account
1) Part of setting up an delicious account requires responding to an initial email verification. At the computer you are sitting at, please take a moment and be sure you can use your school email account, either the Outlook Desktop client, or the web email. You may want to leave a window to your email open as you will check there after you set up your account.

2) In a moment, we are going to jump to the delicious registration page. You may want to do that by copying the link below and opening a a new tab or a new window in your browser so you can jump back and forth between these directions and the delicious page.

3) You will be asked to create a delicious username and password. Consider this a "professional" account. As we share, your colleagues (and eventually your students) will see your username associated with tags. If you make your username "poopsiequoo", you will be unique but nobody will know who you are. An easy way to do this is to use first name-underscore-last name (steve_sokoloski) or first initial-underscore-last name (s_sokoloski). Also, as we create more and more accounts and logins on Web 2.0 tools that share, keeping a consistent username helps other people identify you, your contributions and your work. So take a moment and think about a good professional user name.

4) Link to delicious registration page: [|https://secure.del.icio.us/register?noredir]

5) After you fill in your registration by creating a user name and password you will get an email requesting that you "verify" your account (it if from yahoo-inc.com so you may have to check your JUNK email folder. ** If you click on the link to verify, it is going to open up Internet Explorer because that is the default here on the lab. A better technique for today is to copy the verification link out of your email and paste it into a new tab in the Firefox browser.

6) We are going to follow the steps to add the buttons to the Firefox tool bar. Having the delicious buttons added to the tool bar makes it very easy to tag and save websites into your bookmarks.

7) What's a TAG? A tag is a category or label you choose to label a web page or other resource with. It is not a structured taxonomy like an index or XXX, you choose the TAG. It is sometimes called a FOLKSONOMY, you can call it what ever you want. Hey, baby this is Web 2.0! The first great thing about delicious is that it will keep track of your tagged resources and with a little discipline, you can organize and categorize your tags. The second great thing about delicious is that your tags, are available to you anywhere, anytime you can get to the Internet. Sign into your delicious account and you have all your bookmarked tags.

8) Try out a making a tag. Leave your tab for your delicious account open, and open a new tab in Firefox. Do a Google search, or find apage fro something that interests you. When you get to the page, click on the tag button in Firefox toolbar. A dialog box opens showing the page. In the TAG box label your find with tag(s). Each tag needs to be separated with a space, so each word becomes a tag. Be clever here. A tag about a great restaurant in New York should not be - good food New York (that is 4 separate "tags") but - good_food_NYC, or good_food:NYC all linked together into one word can be a very descriptive and useful tag. Note that there is a small box to check if you want to keep your tag private, by default your tags are shared, click teh box if you do not want to share.

9) If you come back to your delicious tab, (and bear with this - on a new account it may not work quite as smoothly as this sentence implies) you should see the results of your tag. If you do not see it you can try to refresh the page or click on the bookmarks icon in the toolbar to see your tags.

10) Simple? Easy? Great! You exist in your splendid isolation of tagging and organizing your electronic life! However Web 2.0 is not about the YOU, it is about US. Delicious is a SOCIAL bookmarking tool. It is all about the network, it is all about the sharing, it is all about the collective knowledge. We are going to use Steve's account to look at some of the social aspects and how delicious can be used to extend and share knowledge.

11) We will be looking at: a) Exploring tags others have found, b) Looking up specific users, c) Creating and subscribing to a common tag, building a network of like minded users.