A Beginners Guide To del.icio.us

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. What is a Social Bookmarking site? Social Bookmarking is a way to share the bookmarks in your life with others. Some of you might remember loading up your bookmarks in your Internet Explorer browser years ago or – just yesterday. Trying to organize all those bookmarks. The reason they became “all those bookmarks” is because the Internet grew and grew and grew. Now bookmarking has taken on – Social life.

You can now set your bookmarks at social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. del.icio.us allows you to store bookmarks and access them from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. I like that because of that fact, and because the inevitable crash or rebuild of your PC could leave you bookmark-less. If you don’t backup regularly, save or export your bookmarks in your browser(s) then you could be in a world of trouble losing all your bookmarks.

When I started saving my bookmarks on the web, it took me a long time to get used to the fact that my bookmarks were on the web somewhere and I had to have a connection to the Internet to get at them. I’m from a time period where a 24K modem was the way to connect to the Internet. When 56K modems came a long I was in heaven. Now for those of you who don’t remember those days – count your blessings. 🙂 For those of you still dialing up to the Internet, well, sorry. 🙁 For those of you who used to walk 5 miles barefoot in the snow to connect to the Internet to your PC, well, ya’ got me beat.

What is del.icio.us?

del.icio.us is:

1. A place to tag your favorite bookmarks in such a way that you have complete and total control. Tags are one word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks. You can use as many tags as you like, rename or delete them as well. A tag for this blog post might be “blogging” or “bookmarking”.
2. A place to keep you bookmarks to your favorite articles, blogs, music, reviews, recipes.
3. A place to share your bookmarks with your friends, family, coworkers and the del.icio.us community.
4. A place to discover what everyone else is bookmarking.
5. A system of bookmarking that allows you to do whatever you want with it.
6. A place to keep your bookmarked materials for research.
7. A place to keep your track of your wish list so you can email friends and family a link like this – http://del.icio.us/your_del.icio.us_username/wishlist – when it’s time for you to provide those folks in your life who ask you, “What do you want for…?” (fill in the blanks or dots) .
8. A place to check out podcasts. Visit the tag mp3+podcast to start listening.
9. A place to plan a vacation. You can create a tag that resembles your vacation and bookmark all the resources under that tag for your vacation.
10. A place to create a “Linklog”. Linklogs are a way to bookmark your favorite places and add commentary to create a “lightweight linklog.” You can use “linkrolls” or the “daily blog posting” feature to include your del.icio.us bookmarks on your blog or website.
11. Want to create a cookbook? Whenever you find a recipe, save it to del.icio.us. Tag the recipes any way you’d like – by ingredients, style, breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.
12. You can use del.icio.us as a collaboration tool for your friends, coworkers and other groups by sharing an account to store relevant links.

The list is only as short as your imagination – or as long as your imagination. del.icio.us is definitely a bookmarking site to spend some time at and use during your daily or weekly surfing time.

Check out the del.icio.us tag cloud. The larger the tag, the more popular it is. This tag cloud is sorted alphabetically.

Click image for larger view

The same tag cloud sorted by size to give you a sense of popularity.

Click image for larger view

How to Tag

Below is a screen shot of tagging a blog article while at that blog. There are toolbar buttons at del.icio.us that you can drag to your browsers “Bookmarks Toolbar” making it easier to bookmark sites. I used Internet Explorer 7 for this example. While at the blog article, I selected the del.icio.us Tag button and the following screen popped up. The notes were empty and the tags were blank but I’ve filled them in for this example.

Your Blog and del.icio.us

If you have a blog and you want people to bookmark one of your blog articles and tag it at del.icio.us, there are a few ways to do this and I’ll talk about a couple now.

The first way is to add a Bookmark button to your blog from AddThis.com. Open up an account and you’ll have a choice of buttons to choose from. The AddThis.com site also keeps statistics for you which is kind of cool. To place your AddThis button on your blog, you can use their WordPress plugin or add the code that is generated for you at their site and add it to your Main Index Template of your blog’s code before the end of the blog post loop. Use the comments here at this blog post if you need help.

Another way to provide bookmarking for your blog article to del.icio.us is to use the ShareThis button. ShareThis also has buttons for folks who browse the web and want to bookmark sites they visit. You can get the ShareThis buttons for Internet Explorer and Firefox if you’re just interested in reading websites and want to bookmark them. You can get the Firefox add-on here and the Internet Explorer button here.

The del.icio.us Blog

Check out the del.icio.us blog here. Here’s a video explanation of del.icio.us.

TechCrunch has a nice preview of Delicious 2.0 here. Apparently the new design should be here soon but it’s been quiet and everyone’s anxious to see.

There’s a bunch of stuff to check out at del.icio.us so the best way to get going is to – get going. 🙂

Go here to learn more about tags at del.icio.us

Go here to get started with del.icio.us

More excellent resources on del.icio.us and bookmarking:

3 Reasons Why Delicious Bookmarks Beat Digg Traffic Hands Down by Brian Clark at Performancing

How to Get More Bookmarks and Better Links by Chris Garrett

[techtags: Social Bookmarking, Bookmarking, Tags, Tagging]