Not tasty, Delicious

12 August 2006
7:55 AM

Sometimes it takes me awhile to figure out if a new technology is good for anything I want to do. That’s why I only recently got into Delicious, even though it’s been around for a couple years. Delicious, besides having perhaps the best address on the internet, http://del.icio.us, is a social bookmarking tool. You use it to bookmark web pages, just like in your browser, except that the bookmarks are stored online. Some of the benefits are easy to see. Since your bookmarks are stored online, you can access them from any computer instead of just one. Other people who are interested in where you surf can visit your links to see what you have bookmarked lately. Delicious also lets you organize bookmarks with tags, and swap them with other people.

Other interesting aspects of Delicious are the result of pooling all this information together. You can tell how popular a page is in part by how many people have bookmarked it, or if a number of people have all bookmarked it recently. Using the information that users provide when they add bookmarks, Delicious can group together pages on similar topics. It’s no coincidence that Yahoo! recently purchased Delicious—doesn’t that kind of information sound like gold to a search engine?

For me, Delicious is particularly handy because I don’t have a computer anymore; by signing it, I can add bookmarks to my list that I can access from any other machine. Thanks to Delicious RSS feeds, it’s also pretty simple to incorporate your bookmarks list into your site. When I have the time, I’ll do just that. For now, you can see my list of bookmarks on their site. Many of the links probably won’t interest you, but you can probably find at least something interesting.

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