Observant viewers of my website will have noticed the addition of a list of bookmarks to the left titled “del.icio.us bookmars.” This is a new system I am using to keep bookmarks or favorites that I find online. Only instead of them being saved on my computer, they are saved on a website. I then use an RSS-to-Java website to feed the most recent bookmarks to my website.
The more i work with del.icio.us the more i like it. it is really cool as a bookmark manager. when you make a bookmark, you add either a description of the item, as well as one or a series of one word tags. so for example, a website from Christianity Today magazine on the 9.5 theses on Worship ( a reasonably good article btw…9.5 Theses on Worship ) gets tagged with “worship”
Now, what is cool is that i can then type into the url http://del.icio.us/tags/worship and see all the recent bookmarks people have created on worship. this not only unearths obscure things that people have found, but also shows you the ones that l-o-t-s of people are discovering to be worthwhile.
If you want to keep in the loop on a tag like worship, you can “subscribe” to it, and on the websites page, you have an “inbox” where bookmarks from tags you’ve subscribed will be listed. So, on my page, i’ve subscribed to worship, and gettingthingsdone (because i’m a member of the david allen productivity cult).
Finally, if you know someone either personally or through internet reputation whose bookmarks you would consistently be interested, you can go to their bookmarks. http://del.icio.us/merlinmann is the author of the 43folders.com blog which is devoted to mac productivity hacks and “Getting things done.” you can then subscribe to a persons bookmarks and their most recent ones will show up in your “inbox,” on your del.icio.us webpage, i.e. http://del.icio.us/jeffreyclong
the final result is that you have a new way to browse using pages that have been referred by either trusted users or users with similar interests. this can help to eliminate some of the “noise” that you get when you browse with google. all in all it’s a fascinating new internet technology.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Nancy // Feb 5, 2005 at 11:07 am
Thanks for the explanation of del.icio.us bookmarks, Jeffrey. I’ve seen this popping up more and more on the web and haven’t quite understood how it worked. I’m going to give it a try!
2 Amanda // Feb 5, 2005 at 5:48 pm
I caved in on this bookmarking system…I found that for individual articles, it’s much easier to run a system like del.icio.us rather than my browser’s bookmarks. I’ve found it to be a good way to distinguish between full websites and individual web pages. I mainly use del.icio.us for the web pages. Or at least, that’s my intention.
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