john-23things

Great name, but what is it & how do I make it work for me?

At the most basic level, Del.icio.us gives you the chance to take your browser bookmarks, save them to an account on the web, and access them from any PC. See something at work that you want to look at again at home? Don't write it down. Save it to your Del.icio.us account! There are a couple of tools that you can integrate into your browser to make it super-easy to grab content for Del.icio.us. It's like putting stuff in your pocket for later, but without the fluff!

Now of course the story doesn't end there. There are bells, whistles, and assorted additional goodies that take this far beyond a mobile bookmark list. There are two major ways to extend your use of the stuff on Del.icio.us. First, in an online strategy shared with Thing #5: Flickr, you can review content sorted by keyword. The critical ingredient is Del.icio.us tags. When you add a page to Delicio.us, you label it with keyword tags. If you save some great cake recipes and tag the bookmarks "baking", other users will be able to see your selections on the "all pages tagged baking" page, and (more usefully?) on the list of "popular pages tagged baking"


The "popular" page again gives you access to the wisdom of crowds & lets you see which pages have been considered important by other people who share your interests. See the pink bar on the entry at the top of the list? 417 people have bookmarked Bakespace since it was first bookmarked in August 2006. Must be good, right? There's a "save this" link next to the title there, & so with one click, you can bookmark Bakespace too.

Baking not your scene? There's loads of other tags. See the tag-cloud of popular tags on the service, or do a tag search for a keyword (search box, top right of the page) that interests you. The URL's for the pages are consistent too, so you can even go straight to a tag page that you think might exist by typing

http://del.icio.us/tag/whatever or http://del.icio.us/popular/whatever

So you can view content by tag. Cool, but there's another layer of social goodness too, because you can also share Del.icio.us content. Your bookmarks and tags have RSS feeds, (Thing #8) so that other people can subscribe and be notified when you add stuff. You can network with other users to share / suggest links to others and to view links added by other users in your network. You can also display the contents of your Del.icio.us account on your blog by putting a linkroll (list of your recent links) or tagroll (cloud of your tags) in your sidebar, or a Del.icio.us account widget such as this one:

which will let everyone know your signon, the number of people in your network, and the number of people who are "fans" of your bookmarked content.

See Del.icio.us help for a more comprehensive introduction to the service. Del.icio.us is not the only game in town. There are hundreds of sites that offer similar features and functions in various combinations. For a comprehensive list that hits enough feature highlights that you can make a comparison between the sites on offer, check out 3-Spots.