Playing catchup: Delicious

Oh me, oh my. Holiday, illness and a part-time degree have somehow got in the way of me blogging for over two weeks, and I am officially out of the loop. 481 things in my Google reader to whizz through, and 12 more things to go before I can finish the programme, so let's get on.

What is Delicious?

cartoon by Penny Arcade

I can't help but think of this cartoon whenever I hear that question. It's got nothing to do with social bookmarking, really, but it's still a funny comic.
So where to start? I looked at the lists of bookmarks created by Emma, and the Judge Institute, then thought I had better venture forth and try immersing myself without the metaphorical waterwings. I searched for "music", and Emma's bookmarks with that tag were clearly displayed at the top, while the most popular across the web were displayed below. Nice and clear, and all were relevant (which I suppose you'd expect when it's been filtered by approximately 60 thousand people). Refining it a bit further ("free sheet music") got me more refined results, though I defy anyone to explain how paying $9.99 a month makes sheet music free.
Still, the infrastructure seemed to work pretty well.

I can certainly see this as being a useful way of storing your bookmarks, and sharing them with readers in what is effectively a uniquely tailored web portal. When I used to work at the Squire I created pages and pages of bookmarks to international law sites, and this would have been a bit quicker. However, I'm not clear what happens when a website or page dies - presumably the bookmark remains, and you get taken to the dead page? Is there a quick way of finding out which of your bookmarks still work? In the past I've used Xenu, a linkchecking tool, but it would make sense to have something internally built into the collection of bookmarks itself.

On the whole, this feels like a human version of Google (which I guess it pretty much is!). It's good to see whether a lot of people have thought that a link is useful - but then, it depends on what those people are like! For example, and very crudely speaking, I would rate the opinion of five librarians over the opinion of 500 football hooligans, but the website www.lets-throw-things-at-players-heads.com would get a higher Delicious rating than www.books-are-my-opium.org.