Making Your Bookmarks Delicious

Can't remember the name of that cool website your colleague emailed you about praciticing auscultation techniques? How about that website your mom told you about how to baste a turkey? Delicious is a way to keep your bookmarks in one place, no matter what computer you're using.

If you're already using Delicious, kudos to you. If not, once you've read this post, you'll be making all your bookmarked websites incredibly Delicious.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site founded in 2003 by Joshua Schachter and acquired by Yahoo in 2005. According to Wikipedia, by the end of 2008, there were over 5.3 million users and over 180 million unique URLs bookmarked on Delicious.

What is social bookmarking? Social bookmarking allows you to untether yourself from your own computer and be able to access your bookmarks wherever you may be at any computer.

You "tag" your bookmarks to describe a website and those tags are shared with others. Exploring similar tags creates a social network of people interested in similar topics.

Here is a quick way to understand social bookmarking:

Great uses for Delicious:

* Storing and tagging websites that you find interesting

* Create subject specific Delicious bookmarks to share with your colleagues and friends; can also have several people add to the same Delicious account. For example, see what the New York Academy of Medicine Library has in their Delicious account.

* Explore what other people have tagged in their Delicious accounts to help you discover sites you were unaware of but would be highly relevant to your interests

The presenation below gives a quick introduction of what Delicious can do for you.

Social Bookmarking; Delicious. How & Why

View more presentations from David Hopkins.

Read what Delicious has to say about themselves - http://delicious.com/help/learn

Click on the Tools link at the very bottom of a Delicious page to get all the info you need to know how to easily integrate Delcious into your web browser - http://delicious.com/help/tools

Medical Education, Baby, and Me

My son was born at the UCSF Children's Hospital in early January, three weeks before his expected due date, and just one day shy of being considered full-term. Being in a high-risk pregnancy category, I knew that I wanted to have the most experienced members of the medical team at the delivery.

Santiago already contemplating life at the tender age of two weeks

I anticipated that I would probably know several of the interns and students that would be rounding while I was a patient, since I teach many literature searching workshops for the UCSF School of Medicine. My conundrum was whether or not I would feel comfortable having medical students and interns I knew professionally taking care of me in a very private and personal realm. It was tough to decide to want to keep my professional and personal life separate.

When I was admitted, I made a request to the senior attending to have only the attending or R3 (third-year resident) be the one to deliver my baby. In the end, I am very fortunate that the entire labor and delivery teams that oversaw my 32 hours of labor provided incredible expertise and support.

The delivery team consisted of the senior attending, R3, R1 (intern), medical student, labor nurse, and anesthesiologist. I was impressed by the incredible level of patience, knowledge, skill, professionalism, and caring that each member contributed to the team. This mixture of strengths ultimately reinforced my realization that when it came time to actually deliver the baby, it was more important to me to have a strong team with me, regardless of whether or not I knew any of them professionally.

In a way, I learned my lesson to practice what I preach. I have helped several faculty, clinicians and students over the years with finding resources to support the educational model of interdisciplinary education and communication skills within team dynamics. It took having to actually go through a personal experience to truly appreciate the power of this aspect of medical education. I have huge respect for the triumphs of medical education. And so very grateful to have a healthy and happy baby.