Hurley's World

In a recent Genealogy Guys podcast, their guests, Gary and Diana Crisman Smith, mentioned keeping a website log of the sites you visit with notes so that you can remember where specific information came from and to identify sites to revisit at a future date. I definitely recommend the practice and, in fact, have started doing it myself using my del.icio.us account.

For those of you who have not heard of del.icio.us before, it's a site that allows users to create an online bookmark of sites they visit. Since the bookmarks are online, they can be accessed from any computer connected to the Internet. In addition to the url, a user can keep add a site title, notes about the site, and give the site tags, or keywords, which can be used to group sites together. For instance, you may want to tag all genealogy related sites with the keyword genealogy and then all family name sites with the family name as a keyword. The site will also automatically add the date on which you added the site to your bookmarks.

While even this basic functionality is great for genealogists, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. This means you can see who else has tagged any site you add, the keywords they used to tag the site, and what other sites they added to their bookmarks list. This can be useful for a whole host of things including finding cousins, finding other related sites, and finding other people with common interests.

If you use the Firefox browser, you can download an extension which allows you to click on a button and add urls to your del.icio.us account without visiting the website. I hope to write more about this topic in a future post.

Good luck and good hunting!