Thunder

Del.icio.us

9 01 2007

After recommending del.icio.us to many people on many occasions I was asked recently what can you do if someone sends an unsuitable link to one of your students. It stumped me, I didn’t know what to say, there is always the usual line about teaching the students about being responsible users of the internet and getting them to inform an adult about it - what do you think del.icio.us would do, should there be a button to inform them of an unsuitable link??

Any thoughts….

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Date : 9 January 2007
Categories : web2.0

3 responses to “Del.icio.us”

10 01 2007: Ewan McIntosh (08:54:35) :

What if the kid was emailed an unsuitable link? Or had one left on their Bebo page ‘at home’? Or what if someone told them to and look up www…. Or what if they get a pop up while looking at something else?

The argument *has* to come back down to “What are those kids’ reactions going to be after they have been educated about why links like that propagate around the web particularly well, why being asked to look up the site is nothing personal against them blah, blah, blah…

Adding a button is a great idea but we can’t ask every web and email provider to add little buttons to their sites, can we? (genuine question, not snarkiness at the end
12 01 2007: David Muir (11:12:11) :

Unfortunately Ewan, it’s more complicated than that because it is possible to delete an email and edit a Bebo page, however, if someone sends you a link in del.icio.us - at the moment that you are stuck with it.

From the del.icio.us help page:

“Links for you is where you can receive bookmarks from other del.icio.us users. The link to it, at the top of any page on del.icio.us, becomes bold when you receive a new bookmark, so you’ll know to check your links when you get a new one. You can also get there by visiting del.icio.us/for.

There is no way to delete items from this page right now. “

The last line is the key part. Once a child has been sent some link spam in del.icio.us, it seems that they are stuck with it. I have spent a bit of timing Googling to try and find a solution but so far I’ve not found a way to get around this. There is a report abuse section on the del.iocio.us site, but I don’t think this is easy or immediate enough.

I’ve been meaning to contact del.icio.us for some time now to ask for help on this problem. Your post finally spurred me into action. I’ll let you know what response they make.
13 01 2007: Ewan McIntosh (19:51:46) :

Interesting, David, and something I didn’t know, although if I ignore a link and don’t save it it shows, at least, that I am not colluding in the activity and it sends a message that way. Maybe that’s not enough.