It's Delicious

Do you ever feel like you have way too many thoughts and information and wish you had some way to keep track of them all?

No…? Maybe…?

Maybe not. But it never hurts to keep some aspects of your life organized. For instance, people can learn quite a bit about me by the activities that I engage in online because there are certain websites, blogs, pages, etc. that I visit all the time. Multiple times. In one day.

And now, I have recently discovered a way to keep all of these things in one place online – through social bookmarking sites. The premise of these social bookmarking sites is that they allow people to store and organize “bookmarks” of their favorite websites and eventually share them with others. The one I would recommend, and the one that I just recently joined, is called


Now, I am not particularly savvy when it comes to technology. When I first heard about these sites, I thought they were beyond my capabilities. (Forget trying to negotiate one’s ethnic identity. Try negotiating a simple website!) However, Delicious appealed to me because I found it surprisingly easy to navigate. The most important concept that you need to know about social bookmarking sites is “tagging.” Once you’ve bookmarked a page, you can organize it by the tags, or categories, you assign to it. Delicious makes it very easy to find your tags; but not only that, you can organize them further by creating “bundles” of tags, meaning tags that fall under the same major category. If you ever want to find a particular type of article on your profile, all you have to do is click on the correct tag. Easy.

Now here comes the social part. Other people can look up the same articles or pages you saved on your profile by the urls or the tags that you assigned to them. In turn, you can search other people’s bookmarks by the tags that they assign. This allows for the possibility to find new information on your favorite topics of interest, even some you may never would have found otherwise. Incidentally, you may find people who have very very similar interests as yourself.

Not only can social bookmarking sites be used casually, but they are very useful for more scholarly purposes. I can attest to that. I am still in the midst of finding information that pertain to my blog’s topic. This time, I tried utilizing Delicious’ tagging system. I first typed in the tag “advertising” and I found several sites, including blogs that I already knew about. Idecided to narrow my search further by typing sub-tags such as “race,” “ethnicity,” “culture,” and “asian.” I looked through the articles that popped up to see how many of them matched my tags, and I found this: “Markets Focus: Cracking the Asian Conundrum.” The subheading:

“Asian-Americans represent a valuable market, but they're not a monolith.”

Perfect. I found an article that matched my specific niche topic. Furthermore, I can collect all the websites and articles that will help me write my blog and organize them on one page for later perusal.

What sets Delicious apart from other bookmarking sites is that it is one of the biggest and therefore, has one of the largest communities. Imagine all the information you will have access to! Also, they don’t cater to specific types of information; pages cover a wide range of topics, from academic to general. Because my topic is very closely related with issues in popular culture, I found this aspect particularly useful.

So, if you're just using it to have fun, to find people with similar interests, or like me, to look up research for a blog post (such as...about targeted advertising towards Asian Pacific Americans!), Delicious has a lot to offer – if you know where to look.