By Penny Schenk
Of all the Web 2.0 sites I frequent, del.icio.us is the one I find most useful. It offers “social bookmarking”, although I think people are initially drawn to it as a way to keep their own bookmarks well organized in a central place easily accessible from anywhere. For this reason alone it is a great tool – if you bookmark a page whilst you’re in Oxford, you have the bookmark at home, on the road, abroad, etc. It took me some time to investigate its other features, and the Spartan design of the del.icio.us homepage can be a bit puzzling. To find out more about del.icio.us and how its various options work, you must click on help.
The sharing feature of del.icio.us allows you to tag bookmarks you create as being for other del.icio.us users, so for instance, if I want to show something cool to user “delboy” I give it the tag for:delboy. In the future, I will be offered this as a tag option and can just click on it, rather than typing it each time. And if the thing I want to show delboy is for him only, and I don’t want it to be visible to everyone looking at my bookmarks, I can click the do not share option when creating or editing the bookmark. Delboy will still see it on his del.icio.us page under “links for you”. If delboy can’t be bothered to check his del.icio.us page, he can even subscribe to an RSS feed of all links that have been tagged for him (this is an option at the bottom of his links for you section). Once you get in the habit of sharing bookmarks this way, you probably won’t ever want to go back to cutting and pasting long links into emails.
