Hoolintel Recommends Using del.icio.us
Twitter. Flickr. Facebook. THE GPHONE! As everybody well knows, the current pile-up of web 2.0 services promising to revolutionize personal communication will settle into a virtual junk yard we'll laugh about years from now, if we even remember the names (Alas, poor Kozmo). Among the very few web 2.0 services used by the Hoole Intelligence Report, the awkwardly named del.icio.us is a jewel you really should consider trying.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service which allows you to store, organize, cross-reference, and share all the interesting stuff you find on the web. When you find a blog entry, magazine article, or site you like, you click the "post to del.icio.us" link on your bookmarks toolbar, which brings you to the del.icio.us site, where you can add a description to the bookmark and tags.
I tag my del.icio.us links with the key words that identify the content. I further organize my links by grouping them into "bundles" of related tags. In the main bookmark navigation pane, tags are grouped by bundle and appear in darker, bolder, larger type depending on how frequently they are used. In the capture on the right, you can see that "mobilebanking," a tag I frequently use, is a whopper, whereas "demography" is teeny and in a lighter font.
If you regularly use a particular tag like "puppies" to label bookmarks, you can click through that tag's link and see what other del.icio.us users who have an abiding interest in puppies have bookmarked. If you find a user who frequently bookmarks interesting content, you can set up del.icio.us to show you what they've added when you visit the site. I have the RSS feeds for a couple of people's del.icio.us selections hooked up to my Google Reader where any additions show up as headlines.
del.icio.us is loaded with subtle features that will aid avid web surfers and bloggers in their dorky pursuits. If you have a large collection of browser bookmarks, you can get started with the service by uploading them to del.icio.us, which will assign them tags based on your bookmark folder names. Firefox users (superior beasts, in case you were wondering) can download a slick del.icio.us toolbar, making the service that much easier to use. There are widgets available for Facebook and major blogging apps that display your latest del.icio.us links. For those with a couple of web surfing minutes to burn, you could do far worse than clicking the "popular" link at the upper right hand side of the main page, which represents the cream of the web at any given moment.
Mark me, dear Hoole Intelligence Report reader - all the brilliant, provocative scraps you come by on the web today will be displaced by equally interesting jibber jabber tomorrow. For me, del.icio.us is the tool that forms the web into an ongoing reference and a source of learning instead of a pleasant waste of time.
Comments
Indeed, many Web 2.0 apps are flashes in the pan.
I'm apparently a superior beast (aka. Firefox user)... Thanks for that!
I've heard about del.icio.us, seen it linked everywhere, but never even considered it. While I am not a huge bookmarker, I really liked the idea of seeing what other people with similar tags/bookmarks are bookmarking. That alone might get me to check it out.