Delicious Advantages for Contract Professionals

This is a continuation in the Social Media for Contracts series.

Yes, Delicious is a great name for a site. Despite its size and history, not many people in contracting have heard of this website. It has the potential to save you time and make your work even better.

What is Delicious?

First off, Delicious is a social bookmarking site. Basically, it’s a cross between your browser’s bookmarks and Facebook. Unlike Facebook, the entire purpose is sharing ideas, not connecting with friends.

1. Find Better Resources. This is the greatest benefit of (and the central concept behind) Delicious. By accessing your friends’ bookmarks, you can find websites and tools that can make your life easier. This is the key behind what you may have heard as knowledge management, knowledge sharing or knowledge transfer.
2. Improve Your Reputation. You can also gain a reputation as the guru for certain topics by having access to a large amount of resources. Just don’t hog information. That’s not how Delicious works. Spreading helpful information is what it’s about.
3. Tags > Files. Most contracting professionals are familiar with the traditional bookmarking system of files. However, tags are far superior for organizational purposes. Once you accumulate 200 bookmarks, it can be difficult to remember what file you put it under. With tags, you identify the website with numerous phrases or words you know you will remember. Then you just find that word in the tag cloud, and you’ve found your resource. Boom! Far superior.
4. Use Any Browser. For those of you (like me) that switch between browsers at work and home, or just depending on your need – good news! Your bookmarks are not restricted to, say, Internet Explorer. This reduces dependence on a specific browser. And if your company recommends you change from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox (or better yet, Google Chrome), this gives you one less excuse not do it.
5. Access Your Bookmarks from Anywhere. Since Delicious is web-based, you can access your bookmarks from any computer or web phone. If you travel a lot, this can be a major benefit since you can access your favorite resources from all locations.
6. It’s Free. My favorite word. Just like virtually everything reviewed or promoted here, Delicious is free. The only catch is Yahoo! owns Delicious, so you have to have a Yahoo! account to access it. But it’s definitely worth it.

These should be helpful. Keep your eyes out for the next in the series where GovLoop will be covered.