del.icio.us is rather old hat really, but I wanted to copy my comments here from dria’s blog about why I like it.
For those who haven’t heard of it, del.icio.us is a bookmarks site. Once you create an account, you can add a little pop-up button to your browser toolbar, and when you see a site you want to store for later reference, or recommend to someone else, you click on it, it loads up a simple page for you to enter descriptions and tags, and then its stored. You can get to it from anywhere.
It also has a so-called social software component in that it shows you who else has bookmarked that URL thus potentially introducing you to new people who have the same taste in links as you do. See for example [people linking to me]. (Why md5 for the URL hash, I wonder?)
Here’s what I like about it:
- a fairly flat site for bookmark storage where things are tagged rather than buried in folders. I can find my bookmarks more easily on del.icio.us than I can in a web browser’s bookmarks menu;
- bookmarks accessible via my del.icio.us user page from any web browser (the
Hotmail advantage
); and - the handy provision of the ‘remember this’ bookmarklet so that I can click “pop up post to del.icio.us” in my taskbar at any time and post a link to the page I’m looking at for later reference.
I’m actually more or less neutral about the social aspect of it. Links tend to divide into three categories: links chosen by several hundred users; links chosen by a few users and links chosen by me. There doesn’t seem to be a query engine that allows anything more sophisticated than who else linked to this one thing?
I can see myself asking who links to things I’ve tagged politics?
or who links to some of my less popular choices?
as ways to find bearers of fresh links, but the fact that we have one chosen link in common is uninteresting to me.
Related links:
- de.lirio.us, like del.icio.us but Free (via Beth Skwarecki); and
- CiteULike, like del.icio.us but for academic citations (via Liam Hogan).