Del.icio.us

Some time ago I started hearing chatter about a service called Del.icio.us. I wasn't really clear on what it was...something to do with bookmarks. I've never really been in the habit of using bookmarks. Most of the sites I visit I just type the address in for, and everything else I Google. On a lark I visited the site and signed up for an account, and now I get it.

There are two things that make Delicious really useful. First, if you store your bookmarks on Delicious you can get to them from anywhere that has access to the Delicious website. This is a pretty nice feature when you move from PC to PC each day, or if you have ever upgraded PC's and lost your bookmarks. The second great feature is that you can choose to share your bookmarks. Now that may not sound all that fantastic at first, but here's the benefit. Let's say that you bookmarked something you are interested in, like this video of a Tonkinese cat playing fetch. When you visit your bookmarks on Delicious you see your bookmark to the video, as well as the count of the other folks who bookmarked the same link. You can then click on that number and get a list of the people with that link, and then click their account to see what other bookmarks they are sharing. In addition, you can supply tags for your links. So you might tag that bookmark with cats or tonkinese. You could then click on those tags to see what other bookmarks have been tagged with the same label. Of course, if there are any links you would prefer to keep private (such as to your bank or something else sensitive) you can mark those bookmarks as private. The bookmarks will show up for you when you are logged in, but will not appear in your shared list of bookmarks.

This makes bookmarking a lot more appealing for me. There are a lot of times at work that I'll be in the middle of a particularly gnarly problem, and I'll go googling around and finally find some obscure article on the web with a nicely written solution. In the past, I would use the page to solve my problem, then promptly forget it. Now I'm tempted to add it to my Delicious bookmarks and see who else bookmarked the page. If someone else bookmarked the page, they probably have the same interests as I do, so they may have some interesting links I would like to read. In addition, if I'm doing research on a particular subject, it makes sense to search the Delicious database of bookmarks to see what the most popular bookmarks are on my particular subject.

I've included a link to my Delicious bookmarks on the side bar. If you've got a Delicious account and don't mind sharing, post it in the comments.

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Jade Mason