Tasty Communal Bookmarks

This article was originally posted on March 11, 2008.

which Wikipedia defines as “a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering bookmarks.” Why would anyone bother? Not (just) because it’s a cool, web 2.0 application — the real benefits that I can see are:

1. It lets me take my web favorites/bookmarks wherever I go.
I can log into del.icio.us from any computer and see my bookmarks, which are stored “in the cloud.”

2. It lets me view my favorites via a non-hierarchical “cloud.”
I’m becoming a bigger and bigger fan

of this approach since I began storing my e-mail in a single “pile” and searching based on metadata and content (yes, I still have the blog article for “Everything is Miscellaneous” in process). In the case of e-mail, it’s structured metadata (to/from, date, subject); using del.icio.us, it’s tags that I assign and notes I can add.

3. It lets me see how other people tag pages that I have tagged.

If I am interested in “Over Thirty Baseball,” for example, I can tag my bookmarks with that term and can easily bounce to other links that other users have tagged with the same terms. Behold, social bookmarking!

Of course, I can choose to share or not share bookmarks. For example, the link to my internal sales/marketing collateral library is probably not too useful to anyone outside the firm I work for.

I’ll be using this tool more and more at the expense of my traditional, browser-centric, hierarchical, single PC-bound, folder-nested bookmarks, which hadn’t really changed much since Netscape Navigator and Mosaic were the browsers of choice in the mid-1990s. Del.icio.us is a rich and useful tool, but be advised: if you’re importing 380 bookmarks like me, it takes a while to edit (they all come in as private) and tag them all.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.