Keeping track of your favourite websites is easy. When you visit a website, you just add it to your Favourites (or Bookmarks on some browsers). If you’re really organised, you put your Favourites in folders so you can find what you want easily.

So why do you need anything else?

Here are a couple of problems. You might have found that wonderful website when you were browsing at home but you want to use it in school. It’s not much help when the favourite is stored on a computer that’s somewhere else. Even when you’ve got the computer with the favourites, a problem that many of us have is that, however hard we try, it is very difficult to categorise a particular site. I may have found a great site that would be really useful for teaching Shakespeare to an S5 class but equaly good at introducing poetry to primary children. Which folder does it go into - English, Language, Shakespeare, Poetry , etc? You see the problem.

But there is a simple solution that cures all the problems and adds some functions that make your Favourites even more valuable.

http://del.icio.us/

The del.icio.us site lets you keey your favourites online so that they are available from any computer. It also lets you use tags, not folders so that you don’t need to worry about finding one category for your favourite web site. In the example above, the site could be tagged with the words ‘Shakespeare’, ‘English’, ‘poetry’, ‘S5′, ‘primary’ - in fact with as many tags as you want. So when you search using any of the tag words, the site will be listed. Simple but effective. Saving a favourite to delicious is as simple as clicking a button when you’re on a site that you want to bookmark.

If that was all that del.icio.us can do, it would be a godsend but there’s more.

When you save a favourite/bookmark you are also shown how many other people have also bookmarked that site. You can then go to their bookmarks to see if they have bookmarked any other sites that might interest you. In this way, you can quickly build up a collection of bookmarks because you can share in other people’s bookmarks.

And there’s more.

Because it is so simple to set up a del.icio.us account and fill it with bookmarks, you could set up collections of bookmarks for your children to access. As an example, I’ve set up a site with a few bookmarks on Egyptians at http://del.icio.us/Egyptians. When you go there you can see the sites I’ve collected and link to the websites. You could do the same for any project or subject area. Because they’re online, children can access them from school or home and you can add to them from any computer

And there’s more.

But I hope you’re sufficiently interested by now to go to http://del.icio.us/
to set up your own account and explore the possibilities.