Bookmarking History

Lets say you found an interesting web site on Oklahoma Civil War Battlefields. You could just save it in your browser's bookmarks (or "favorites" for you Internet Explorer users), and pull it up anytime you sit down at your computer. All well and good, but how would you pull up this web site if you are somewhere else, like at school or a friends house? That's were del.icio.us comes in.

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else's.

Use del.icio.us to:

• Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.
• Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.
• Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone's favorite - they've already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

Just visit del.icio.us/help for more information.

The real power behind del.icio.us is in how you use your tags.

Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to any bookmark. Tags can't contain quotation marks or white space, but are otherwise unrestricted. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like, and rename, delete, add or merge tags together.

Let's take our Civil War map as an example again. We start by using some broad term tags about this site: Maps, Oklahoma, and History.

Now you (or anyone for that matter) can look under any of these tags to find this bookmark. However the problem with broad term tags is they cover a wide variety of stuff. Over time you may have sift though a large list to find anything in particular.

How about we get a little more detailed in our tagging: CivilWar, IndianTerritory, Battlefields, 1863, 1861, HoneySprings, Chustenahlah, CabinCreek.

This may seem like an over abundance of tags, but you will thank yourself later when you come back a month from now looking for related bookmarks.

There are also variations of tags to consider. CivilWar, Civil_War, and Civil-War all mean the same thing, but are completely different tags. So just so you can find your own stuff, try to be consistent in your tagging.


example in posting to del.icio.us

One last tag for you to try. If you would like to share your Oklahoma history links to the rest of the BlogOklahoma.us readers, just add the tag "BlogOklahomaUS".

We've added a link to del.icio.us/tag/BlogOklahomaUS right on our sidebar for quick access. It looks like this:

del.icio.us bookmarks