Del.icio.us: Getting Social with Your Bookmarks

By C. David Gammel, CAE

Originally published in Executive Update.

A challenge with browsing the web has always been bookmark maintenance. Sorting a crowded list of bookmarks in your browser is usually a painful task that many people never bother with. Even carefully maintained bookmark lists can be lost due to hard drive crashes and system upgrades if the user hasn’t stored a backup. In fact, search engines such as Google have improved so much that many people do not even bother with bookmarks any more and rely on searching to find those pages they visited in the past, giving up on a traditionally key tool for browsing the web.

However, all that bookmark pain may be a thing of the past due to a new free service has come to the rescue: del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us is described as a social bookmark service. At its most basic, you can enter your bookmarks into the site and assign keywords and descriptions to them to help you sort them more easily. Since it is a web-based system, you can access your links from any computer with web access, which solves the portability problem. The web-based nature of the service will also prevent losing your bookmarks when your computer goes kaput or you move to a new system.

Social Bookmarks

Del.icio.us truly innovates with the keyword aspect of the service. Not only can you browse your bookmarks by keyword, you can also see what other people have filed in the system under the same keywords that you have used. This is where the ‘social’ part of the service comes in. I have discovered numerous web sites and resources through browsing links posted to keywords that I have an interest in.

To view links submitted by all users for particular keywords, simply type in http://del.icio.us/tag/ into your browser address bar. After that last forward slash, type the keyword you are interested in. So, for example, to see all links posted with the keyword ‘knowledge’, you would type http://del.icio.us/tag/knowledge. That will display a page with the most recent links submitted with the keyword knowledge.

Del.icio.us Tools

There are a number of tools available that integrate with the del.icio.us web site. You can add context menus to your web browser (the little menus that pop up when you right-click on a page) that allow you to quickly add a bookmark for that page to your del.icio.us account. Another browser plug-in lets you import your del.icio.us bookmarks into your browser’s bookmark list. You can also get software that will let you edit your links in del.icio.us directly from your desktop.

Hopefully del.icio.us will help you to more efficiently manage your bookmarks and to discover new and interesting web resources via the del.icio.us community of users. Happy bookmarking!

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High Context Consulting, LLC