Del.icio.us: first impressions on social bookmarks

Hi colleagues! Here we are again doing a new e-tivity, but this time exploring the Del.icio.us-sphere. We are learning a lot of new things in this English course! Not only we are improving our English but also our abilities in using net tools. I have to confess that I never heard anything about social bookmarking before. Therefore, it was a kind of adventure to do something completely new as this e-tivity.

Well, what is Del.icio.us? Del.icio.us is a huge space on web where you can create your own little space, which contains your personal bookmarks. This means that you have a small space where you can put all web sites that you are interested in. Furthermore, you can put a new title to the link you have chosen and add a brief description to it in order to simplify your future searches.

But why is it called Social bookmarking? The greatest thing of Del.icio.us is that it is a community where everybody can share everybody's web sites. That means that you can always spread your personal bookmarks by adding those of other people. That also means that if you need more infomation about a particular topic you can just put it as a tag and all links that deals with it will appear.

Another peculiar aspect of Del.icio.us is that it does not contain every single web site that you can find on Internet but only those chosen by Del.icio.us users. If you are doing some searches on Del.icio.us you are going to find only web sites contained in this big area. Therefore, there is a some sort of selection.

I've also looked at my collegues' bookmarks and I've discovered that all of them have found very useful links. First of all, I think that Urban Dictionary chosen by Alice and Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms of the UK chosen by Lucrezia are very interesting. I adore music and learning lyrics of my favourite bands and singers. Very often their lyrics contain slang terms and colloquialisms that I can't understand. Obviously these type of dictionaries are very useful in informal and colloquial conversations. Almost all of them have found sites that might help us to improve our English; grammmar, punctuation, vocabolary... Lucrezia, for example, has discovered a way to find if words are spelled correctly. I think that I will post this site to my favourites because very often I have some doubts about spelling. Marco and Giorgia give us sites to translate words to use especially if you are doing your e-tivities far from home and you don't have a dictionary (Just like me!!!).