by 
The concept of the bookmark goes back as far as any web browser I have ever used. Back in the days when Netscape was the browser of choice, it was a big thing to be able to click a link and get a given site added to your bookmarks. They were then stored in the seemingly bottomless menu that you could then hunt through to find the site that you bookmarked again.
Internet Explorer came around and named them Favorites. This lead to the weird logical discussion of:
- If you choose 1,000 sites as your favorites, are they all really your favorites?
- And (the almost as compelling) what if you want to save a url that isn’t your favorite?
Regardless, the motif was used and they expanded to letting you put links on the toolbar in case you had something that was really your favorite… hmm. We already went there.
The problem with either of these solutions was many:
- It was hard to find anything (except the true favorites).
- You were constantly reorganizing, trying to make sure that things that weren’t as popular now got shuffled into the right place.
- Bookmarks on one computer were not the same as the bookmarks on another unless you went through some manual process.
- You ended up sending links you liked to other people through e-mail.
Enter De.licio.us. A very hard URL to remember, but who actually types URLs when you have bookmarks!
With a free signup, you can solve all of the problems traditional bookmarks have:
- With tagging technology, you can tag each URL with an unique string or set of strings. To find the bookmark you’re looking for, you simply click in the list or tag cloud to find the topic and you have found your bookmark.
- You can organize tags into bundles, if you so choose and wish to be organized, but as long as you stick to some basic tags you should be able to keep things in the right place.
- Since it’s on the web, you can get to your bookmarks from any location. Not only that, there’s a Firefox plugin that lets you highlight some of the text in the page that you’re viewing, click a button, type in the tags, and you’ve recorded the bookmark!
- You can use special tags to let your friends know of the links that you want to share. You can set up a network of friends, an monitor links that other friends have designated for you to see!
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for De.licio.us and let’s get networked!
“M”,
I use delicious, but one caution I would suggest is to remember that the links are publicly viewable. That means that if you have links of a personal nature (like your bank, for example) it might be better not to include them in delicios.
–Larry
Larry– it would be worse if you left as your comments your user name and password! Have you tried Firefox? I’m not sure about IE, but I know that Firefox has a really useful plugin for bookmarking items on Del.icio.us.
I believe that there is a way to mark your bookmarks as private, instead of public– but you have to make sure you do it.
So, are you going to add me to your circle of Del.icio.us friends?
Well, to date I have not set up a circle of friends. Perhaps I should think about that.
Delicious has a toolbar for IE that does basically what the Firefox plug-in does. I use that. I think it’s necessary if Delicious is to be useful. The URL is too dif.icu.lt.
–Larry
The nice thing is that once you’ve set the thing up you can see things that your friend have bookmarked, and can say that something is marked for someone else.
Mine are well organized and I don’t have problem finding what I need. Thanks though!
Well, mine are NOT well organized, yikes…I have a mile long list of favorites both on FF and then there’s my old ones from IE. I’m so bad about bookmarking things when I’m in a hurry and want a closer look later…for instance, researching for my fiction. So many rabbit trails, which one leads to the den?!?
So I definitely need something like delicious, and will probably jump on at a later date! I’ve got a conference to get ready for now!
I really like this site for tagging items. My bookmarks are organized much better than just using favorites. I agree with Larry though that your circle of friends can see things, but I usually just select the private prompt! It works great!