A Del.icio.us Discovery

Before this weekend, I had still not taken the time to look into the power of using del.icio.us within my arsenal of convenience.  Now I am addicted.  What inspired me was a conversation with one of our newest clients, Marc Brinitzer.  Marc was describing just how easy del.icio.us had made his blogging life, and I was immediately interested.  Rather than describe his revolutionary experience myself, I thought it would be better first hand from Marc himself.

A Del.icio.us Discovery

You've been there.  A new piece of software or add-on (Firefox) looks really cool.  You download it with great anticipation, only to have it wreak havoc on your browser's feng shui.   So it was when I first downloaded del.icio.us.  I had just finished organizing & arranging my favorite toolbar icons.  I had shortened the long bookmarked names to fit all the good stuff in, and then wham, in a download, it was gone.  Panic.

Impatient by nature and perennially short on time, I had skipped the "manual".  Hmm....no choice now.   All my bookmarks had been sucked out of my Firefox browser and into my del.icio.us account.  Reluctantly, I dug in to figure things out.  But as I began to fiddle around, I discovered some wonderful things.

What I had come across is the new notion of social bookmarking.  I have heard this phrase before and never really understood exactly how to apply it.  And yet, when you think about it, it makes perfect sense:  an online community of common bookmarks.   We can't be expected to know all the sites that meet our interests, but we certainly recognize when we come across one that does.  In this Age of Participation, we are coming to understand that there are great numbers of others that share our interests.  One of the ways we are able to share our common interests, through collective collaboration, is in the form of online bookmarks. 

The first cool aspect of del.icio.us that I discovered was that it offers web based location where you can organize your bookmarks and automatically synchronize them with any computer your working from: office, home, laptop.   Log on, no matter where you are, and your browser presents the same friendly face.  Very nice. 

Second, I found that when I use the 'Tag' button, conveniently added to the main toolbar, I can instantly bookmark a site and at the same time associate that bookmark with any number of "tags", of either my own choosing or apparently from the the favorites of the del.icio.us community.  Think of a tag as category or topic.  This convenient grouping function then allows me to search and find all the bookmarks that are related by topic.  Delicious writes, "Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us. They're a little bit like keywords but non-hierarchical. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and easily rename or delete them later. Tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders."   You can also see what the greater community has 'tagged' using the same descriptions.  For example, I may have a couple of bookmarked sites for the tag 'dictionary', but the community has dozens.  This gives me the opportunity to learn of more sites being tagged similarly.

Thirdly, if you use Firefox or IE7 as your browser, with a single click you can open all the bookmarks associated with that topic within one browser window, using tabs.  So, when I'm blogging for instance, I can open everything I need to research, produce and promote.  When I want to review the bond market and financial news in the morning, it's all in one place, all at once.  Way cool.

Another cool aspect about Del.icio.us, is that you can easily share your bookmarks with friends and family by telling everyone the link to your public bookmarks; it's http://del.icio.us/username.  You can even share only your bookmarks in a specific tag, give them a link to http://del.icio.us/username/tag.  So let's say I have twenty bookmarked mortgage sites that I visit frequently, I can share those specific links with anyone by simply giving the url to my own page of mortgage bookmarks.  There are even RSS feeds available for your bookmarks and tags, which anyone can subscribe to, to be notified of new bookmarks under the same tag. 

You can also create a network within the del.icio.us community. Anyone within your network will be able to see your latest links without having to visit your del.icio.us page directly. You simply share the bookmark with people in your network by clicking on their username(s).  For more on del.icio.us networks follow this link.

One last cool aspect of Delicious are Link rolls.  It is, simply put, a way to share your bookmarks with the people who read your website or blog. You can add a little piece of code  (javascript) to display an automatically-updated list of your latest bookmarks on your webpage.  Daily blog posting is another way to do this; it automatically creates posts to your blog containing your latest bookmarks for all of your readers to digest (you'll need to be logged in to learn more about this from the FAQ's)

Be certain, we will hear from readers about how to take advantage of this tool, but these above discoveries were worth the price of admission. 

Now just wait until you stumble upon StumbleUpon's social bookmarking...

Thanks Marc.
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We don't normally bait comments here on the Tomato, but this is genuinely something that I would love to learn more about from our readers.  If anyone has some unique suggestion on how to more effectively use del.icio.us, we would love to hear from you.

Comments

[Dave Smith]

There is a del.icio.us widget. You can automatically display any link associated with a specific tag on your blog.

Example. I have one set up for Tucson In The News, any link I tag with Tucson In The News will automatically show up as a link on the blog instantly.

I love this feature.

[Joel Burslem]

Using del.icio.us/popular/[tag name] shows you the most popular sites with that tag. I use this function all the time to tap into the 'wisdom of the crowds'.

[Jim Cronin]

One of the challenges that I can't seem to overcome (ideas?) is te innability to customize the order in which the bookmarks under a tag appear. Take for example: "news" - I have like 10 sites that I consider to be "news" worthy. However, they are not in the order in which I would like to read them. In fact the order just seems to be in reverse chronological order as I added them. Does anyone have a solution for this. It is by no means a deal breaker with del.icio.us, just an annoyance that could easily be avoided.

[Derek Burress]

Speaking of that last sentence, what exactly is stubleupon.com about?

Noticed the other day that I had started getting a lot of traffic from that site. Someone had bookmarked my site but that was about as far as I got. I used del.icio.us at times but other than that digg and real estate voices seems to be the best social book mark related sites for my traffic viewers.

[Jim Cronin]

StumbleUpon is basically the best targeted time waster there is...
It's like del.icio.us in the sense that the user can tag something as 'liked it' and give it keywords to describe or catalogue it... but what it 'seems' to do is:
The more you use it, the more it learns from your likes/dislikes based on community feedback for similar 'tastes' - and, as you stumble it presents websites that are more to your liking based on the catergories you 'trained' it to return. Somthing that is highly 'liked' in a category will appear more often to those that have not yet 'voted' for it, based on the assumption that it must be likeable because so many have said so. Try it until you get it. It is fun - and because the network has spread so well, the depth of sites is rich and the better examples have risen to the top.

[teresa boardman]

StumbleUpon - I know we are supposed to be commenting on del.icio.us., but if you have a few hours try stembleupon, very addictive, it has figured out that I am maybe half a bubble off center so I get all the weird stuff, very entertaining. A couple of months ago I played around with del.icio.us., I do have an account, I'll go back and try it again and figure out how to use and appreciate it. I did not find it at all intuitive.

[Jim Cronin]

The most valuable function I find with del.icio.us is having shortcut icons in my navbar that pull up the lists of related websites for the many tasks I need to have organized.
Take blogging for example: I have shortcuts to 'Before' 'During' and 'After'. The 'before' is a set of research links: technorati, google blogsearch etc. The 'during' is another set up tools such as stock image sites, or quote sites. TWhe 'after' is the dance I need to do after the post: digg, realestatevoices, activerain etc. This organization is a real time saver, and keeps me on the path.
I have others too, like banking, bills, news, email, readinglist etc... All these navbar shortcuts to organized lists are now just one click from anywhere. That's the best part.

[Cheryl Allin]

To expand on an earlier comment, if you want to view del.icio.us bookmarks that have a string of tags (like "Virtual Assistant), you can go to http://del.icio.us/tag/Virtual+assistant - just include a plus sign between each tag.