There are many times that I come across a website or article online that I find useful and want to be able to find it again later. Early on in my web-surfing days I would simply bookmark it using the built-in tool of Internet Explorer or Firefox. But for the past years I’ve been using the web-based “social-bookmarking” service called delicious.com (formerly del.icio.us).
The initial thing that appealed to me with delicious was the fact that I could easily access my bookmarks from whatever computer (with web access, of course) I was using. This proved to be very valuable, as I was splitting time between my work desktop, personal laptop, and home desktop. Firefox and Internet Explorer have addons to the browser that easily integrates my bookmarks and essentially replaces the built-in bookmarks feature.
Two other features of delicous that I now find useful, but didn’t really utilize at first, are tagging and notes. Tagging a bookmark is entering a one-word description of the link or site that your saving. You can tag a stie with multiple tags, too. What this does is it gives you an easy way to remember something relevant about the site you’re saving and allows you to categorize your bookmarks together, so you can get to multiple related sites quickly. Notes let you write out general ideas about that site or anything else you want to remember. A common usage of this feature is by bloggers who want to start working on a new post, but don’t want to write out the whole thing right then.
What I’ve recently started to find very useful about the site is the social aspect. While I usually go to Google when I want to find something there are times that I want to know what other people are using or finding on a topic. Google tends to give the best, most relevant links based on your searches, but you really don’t know until you go to the link. Delicious, on the other hand, shows you how many people have saved a particular link. You know for certain that a particular site is popular based on how many tags it has.
To get started all you have to do is go on over to the site, start a new account, and then start saving links. You can also import your saved bookmarks/favorites from your local browser, so you’ll be able to get started very quickly. Check out my bookmarks while you’re at it.
See also: Yahoo gives Delicious more speed, fewer punctuation marks