You may have noticed an item on my sidebar filled with words and phrases in different sizes and colours. This panel is a representation of my del.icio.us tag cloud and each word or phrase is a tag that links back to a range of bookmarks I have uploaded to a social bookmarking site called del.icio.us. The purpose of this tag cloud and the reason it is on my site is to share bookmarks of sites I have come across which may be of interest to you, my visitors to this site.
By clicking on the tags you will be taken to a page on del.icio.us which will list all the web sites that are described by that tag. To use an example, try clicking on the tag "Court". When you do, your web browser will take you to a page on del.icio.us which lists all the bookmarks I have which use the tag "Court" together with any comments I may have made. If you then click on the title of the bookmark you will be taken to the site itself. You will also notice that there is a sidebar with tags which may be relevant to this "Court" tag and if you click on those links you will be taken to a similar page which will focus on the new tag and which will list another set of bookmarks. You may also notice that some bookmarks have a notation indicating how many people have also bookmarked that site on del.icio.us. In this example below, the Supreme Court of the United States’ site has been bookmarked by 178 other people using the del.icio.us service and if you click on that pink notation you will be shown who those 178 people are and what they find interesting (this is one of the reasons del.icio.us is a useful research tool). At the moment, my "Court" page will look something like this:
I have started actively updating my del.icio.us bookmarks as I find interesting items on the Web and you will find that the tag cloud will change over time. The larger tags are tags that are used more often (I have given them a red tinge to indicate they are more actively used tags and therefore a little warmer than the rest. Most of these bookmarks have been imported directly from my browser bookmarks and have been accumulated over a period of time. You may find these links interesting and helpful yourself.
Of course these bookmarks which are represented by my tag cloud on this site are only a subset of the bookmarks I have on del.icio.us (specifically, the bookmarks represented on this site are all tagged with the tag "law"). You are welcome to browse those links as well. They relate to a range of topics beyond law.
If you are a del.icio.us user and would like to share relevant bookmarks you can add bookmarks with the tag "for:pejrm" and I will be notified of these links and will be able to add them to my own if I find them relevant so feel free to explore and bookmark the sites you visit. For more information on the social bookmarking phenomenon and some alternatives to del.icio.us, visit the post titled "Social bookmarking" on the new media blog, chilibean.
Tags: del.icio.us, social bookmarking, tags, tag cloud, bookmarks, law, court, chilibean, tutorial
