Delicious Bookmarks
Jan 19, 12:20 by Lorna
Bookmarks and favourites are something we all use and most people are pretty lost without theirs. They don’t contain anything you couldn’t get back to by using your search engine of choice but they’re just there, and ready for you to jump straight to your destination. Things to read, regular surfing destinations and reminders to self are all wrapped up in there but if you use another machine or upgrade your browser, they’ll be gone.
Del.icio.us
This is exactly where del.icio.us comes in. It allows you to store all your links there, with tags and descriptions, to make them easy to find in the future. It doesn’t store them in the sense that pasting the URL into a textfile does either, it’s really easy to use as del.icio.us will provide buttons to drop onto your browser’s toolbar which you can use to instantly add the link and tag it, and then go back to what you were doing.
Its free to use, just sign up and get going. You can provide other people with a link to your del.icio.us bookmarks too, which is great – you can just tell them to look there rather than remembering to send them an email address. For example here’s my del.icio.us page with all my bookmarked links on there.
Tagging Links
The tagging is a way of categorising links, but rather than the traditional model of news sites in one folder, cycling sites in another folder, cookery sites in the next, and so on, tagging allows you to attach as many labels, or “tags” to each item as you need to. So I might tag this article with “woollyblanket” “del.icio.us” and “bookmarks”. It’ll appear under all three tags and allows me to group things together in sets which overlap.
Sharing
Del.icio.us also lets you share with people. If you know someone’s del.icio.us user name, you can add them to your network. This allows you to tag items to be shared between you, and they’ll appear in your list as being from them. Its a nice touch for those “I saw this and thought of you” moments [1].
What’s in it for them?
For the cynics around, perhaps you are wondering if there’s a catch. You get this great piece of software, and its free, and you can do what you like with it … but you’ve got a nagging worry about this being a bit of a free lunch. The catch is this. Every time you tag something, you help del.icio.us with its indexing of all the content on the web. Anyone can go to the del.icio.us home page and look for URLs tagged in a particular way. Your information goes into the aggregator with everyone else’s and forms the basis of the search results on that site. That doesn’t seem like a bad price to pay to me.
1 Probably only makes sense in the UK, it was a Royal Mail advert a few years ago
