Moving Bookmarks between del.cio.us accounts

July 29, 2008 7:42 PM

Simple del.icio.us question, followed by extensions. First, I have an account and an organization I'm helping to launch has an account. What's the easiest way to move bookmarks to this new account?

This group of school librarians is going to be using del.icio.us, Shelfari and some other SN sites to do some collaboration and professional discourse. In your experience, when is it best for groups to have their own dedicated accounts on services like these (as opposed to using the 'group' and network functions...)?

Finally, any good rules of thumb on when it's better to create separate accounts when using a service for multiple purposes (for example, using Shelfari as a reading log as well as a list of possible acquisitions) and when it's better to simply use tags to differentiate within a single account?

posted by carterk to computers & internet (3 comments total)

For del.icio.us you can use the "for:username" tag to send links to the organization's account. Then when logged into the organization account tag them as appropriate for them.
posted by izoralee at 9:11 PM on July 29, 2008

Right- that's actually the best way I'd thought of for doing it (short of setting up another browser with del.icio.us buttons that link to the new account rather than my personal one). Thing is, I have 40 or 50 bookmarks to transfer, linking each one seemed a bit cumbersome, Thanks, tho.

Come to think of it, could I just create new del.icio.us buttons in my existing browser *in addition to* the ones that connect to my personal account? But then I would lose my existing tags... hmm...
posted by carterk at 9:26 PM on July 29, 2008

Hey, this is my kind of question! (I'm the Delicious community manager intern.)

Asuming that your current account only contains those 40-50 desired bookmarks and not several hundred other random ones, you can use the "export" function in settings to make a file containing the bookmarks. Then log into the organization's account, find the "import" function in settings, and upload the file. Right now imported bookmarks are private by default, but in the near future you'll have the option to make an imported set of bookmarks public or private.

Communal vs. personal accounts depends on your group. Do you think members will be interested in using Delicious for both personal and work bookmarking, and will they want to "for:" each other links? Individual accounts might work better then. You can tell people a special tag to use for bookmarks for the group, and then everybody can check out the group bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/tag/superdupergroup2008.

But if you want a group presence that's neat and self-contained, a communal account is nice. Then you can take advantage of shared tags - you can tell people to browse around an account and visit http://del.icio.us/superdupergroup2008/specialinterest instead of instructing them about tag combinations (so they can look at http://del.icio.us/tag/superdupergroup2008+specialinterest).

Keep in mind that it can be something of a pain to maintain two or more different accounts. The buttons on your toolbar or bookmark bar save links to whichever account is currently logged in, so you have to log out of one account and into a different account if you want to save a bookmark to that one. There are some third-party tools that help with this (delicious Complete and Pukka are the ones that I know do this).

We're probably going to add a real groups feature someday, we're considering better multiple-account support in the official add-ons, and this kind of community thing will also someday be documented in some place that is more easily accessible than the inside of my head (and various scattered mailing list posts). Hope your group enjoys using Delicious! There are a lot of resources out there created by fellow libraries & schools who use it, and I like helping out too.
posted by dreamyshade at 11:30 PM on July 29, 2008 [2 favorites has favorites]