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Sunday May 01, 2005

Bookmarks on the Web: del.icio.us

A friend of mine introduced me to del.icio.us a couple of years ago, but I didn't take the time to really figure out what it was for... and the name "del.icio.us" was a bit confusing and hard to remember how to spell. Anyway, if you use the Internet, you should use del.icio.us. Or maybe another similar service, but del.icio.us is the most popular right now, and they just got VC funding, so hopefully we can expect it to grow and improve.

So, where do you start? What's the point of del.icio.us? In a very basic sense, it's like having your bookmarks on the web, which by itself is very useful (you can access them from any computer, etc.). But the real value of del.icio.us is that you can tag your bookmarks with keywords to categorize them under. Furthermore, you can see who else has bookmarked a webpage, what tags they used, and what other bookmarks that person has. So in a sense it's a social network of bookmarks. And if bookmarks are any indication of a person's web-surfing experience, then del.icio.us is a network of web experiences. The coolest features to me are that you can subscribe to RSS feeds for any tag, including another person's entire bookmark collection or just a subset. For example, if you wanted to subscribe to the Java RSS feed from all del.icio.us users, you would simply subscribe to http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/java in whatever RSS aggregator you use (I have to recommend trying Thunderbird for that). Or if you just wanted the Java bookmarks feed from me, you could subscribe at http://del.icio.us/rss/bdondo/java (this is not recommended, as I am not a real Java programmer!). It's amazing how many useful and interesting sites I've found this way. If RSS isn't your thing, then maybe just check out the most popular websites page directly. You might find some cool stuff.

And now to the how-to portion..

1. Sign up for an account here.
2. After you log in, go to the http://del.icio.us/doc/about page and you'll see a section called "Bookmarklets".
3. Drag the link named "my del.icio.us" to your bookmark bar or folder (Yes, drag the link.. don't just click on it).
4. Drag the link named "post to del.icio.us" to your bookmark bar or folder as well.
5. Now when you come to a web page you would like to bookmark in del.icio.us, simply click on your "post to del.icio.us" bookmark that you just added to your bookmark bar/folder. A window will pop up asking for tags and some optional additional description.
6. Now you can access your bookmarks by clicking on the "my del.icio.us" bookmark you added to your bookmark bar/folder in step 3.

That's it.. it's really easy.

(2005-05-01 08:28:35.0/2005-05-01 08:28:52.0) Permalink Comments [0]
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