Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service. It puts together all the "favourites" of the subscribers, it recombines them, it makes statistics of them... it draws a map of the net based on the preferences of those who contribute.
In Patricia Donaghy's blog there is a good screencast (actually, once you see one, you get another dozen) about how to build a network of contacts and widen one's webliography with del.icio.us.
How does it work? Every time I bookmark a website, this is added to my page. When I look at this page I see the list of my favourite web sites, but I also see that, for example, website such is also a favourite site of 20 other people. Not only: of each of them I can see the whole list of favourites and how he/she organized them. So maybe I find out that one of these has the same interests I have, and among his favourite websites has some that I already know, but surely also many more that I haven't seen yet. So I take advantage of somebody else's experience not to surf randomly, somebody else who has something in common with me.
So I can also add this person to my network. If I look at 'my network' page I see the names of those I chose as "interests neighbours", but I also see all their favourites, from the most recent to the least. I can also be useful to my network's members: when i discover a website I'm not really interested in (if I am interested directly, I just bookmark it and my network mates will see it anyway), but I know that somebody in my network could find this site interesting, I can forward it to him directly through del.icio.us.
Charmed by this thing, I immediately tried. From the first one of my "faves" three network members sprang out and three more faves to add... Looks like a fruitful way of knowing people and resources, and a timesaver too.
Let's think of using it in a class, for example during an online quest. The students can optimize times (obviously if enough motivated) and create each his or her own network of URL's, they will organize and use at leisure...
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