Those who subscribe to my link blog on the right side of this page might have wondered why it's gone very quiet in the last little while. The reason is that I've discovered a much more effective and sociable way to share my bookmarks with the world. It's called del.icio.us, and I'm by no means the only person to discover it.
Delicious (I'm going to drop the dots and capitalise for your sanity and mine) is the most popular site in a wave of social bookmarking tools. The idea is simple: bookmark sites you visit so you can find them again, but also so others can see what you recommend. When you bookmark a site with Delicious, you are required to enter keywords for the link. These keywords help you and others find the site again, and they are called tags.
The neat features of Delicious are evident from the first few pages you visit. First, all the pages have easy-to-remember URLs. My home page is del.icio.us/mjryall. Pages I've tagged with "firefox" are listed on del.icio.us/mjryall/firefox. You can see pages tagged by anyone with "firefox" and "extension" at del.icio.us/tag/firefox+extension. Easy, eh?
What this means is when you want information in a certain area, but aren't sure of exactly what to search for, you can try Delicious for recommended links. Try recipe+chicken, tetris+flash, restaurant+sydney.
Next, the creators and users of Delicious have created bookmarklets (Javascript bookmarks) that make Delicious bookmarking just as easy as regular bookmarks.
The features are so compelling that I'll shortly be converting my link blog to a feed running off my Delicious links.
I could go on about Delicious RSS integration, tag groups, media tags, and a lot of other things, but why don't you just try it out?
