n-1+Soup [Danny Malks' Blog]

Do you use Del.icio.us?

Do you use Del.icio.us? I highly recommend you try it.

Del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/) is a "social bookmarks" application in the form of a simple website where registered users can attach metadata to any website of interest. It's one of these ideas that many of us have thought about and thankfully there's a fully functional version currently available free of charge at http://del.icio.us/.

The metadata is in the form of simple "tags" or keywords that are associated with a URL. This is similar to any of the many bookmark manager applications that might run locally on your computer, but it's more powerful because you're tagging URLs and storing them in sandbox where anyone can play.

This is great not only because you now have a set of your own bookmarks that is accessible from anywhere on the 'net and from any browser, but also because you're categorizing the bookmarks and able to see how many others have bookmarked the same sites and how they have categorized them.

Additionally, each tag is exposed as an RSS feed so you can subscribe to RSS feeds for things like:

'all sites tagged with the keyword "Java"' or 'all sites tagged with the keyword "Wireless"'.


Furthermore, each user's set of bookmarks is exposed as an RSS feed, so you can subscribe to things like:

'all sites that Danny Malks has tagged' (http://del.icio.us/rss/dmalks/patterns ...or you can use a browser to view all the sites that Danny Malks has tagged - http://del.icio.us/dmalks ...this is the screenshot to the right. I've only started tagging a few things thus far but you can get an idea for how it looks) or you can subscribe to an RSS feed for things like:

 'all sites that Danny Malks has tagged relating to "Patterns"' (http://del.icio.us/rss/dmalks/patterns ... or you can use a browser to view all the sites that Danny Malks has tagged relating to "Patterns" - http://del.icio.us/dmalks/patterns).

Of course you can also subscribe to the RSS feed for a tag, meaning you'll see sites that are tagged *across* users that are labeled with the same bit of metadata...so if you and I both tag something as having to do with "patterns", we can view that as an RSS feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/patterns) or via a web page (http://del.icio.us/tag/patterns).

This is an incredibly powerful way to store and share information, since it provides location transparency for bookmarks for an individual user as well as a view into sites in which other are finding value. This is the social part of the term "social bookmarks" that describes Del.icio.us and our ability to use it to discover the sites people care about and the way people are grouping those sites...it is a  truly powerful  phenomenon.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Posted at 01:00MD Maj 17, 2005 by malks in General  |  Comments[1]