That sounds delicious: How an online bookmarking service can improve your life

We live in an age of overwhelming waves of information. And as useful as the internet can be, even savvy users have trouble sorting the good from the bad and then storing it for future reference.

The del.icio.us solution

The simplest way of looking at del.icio.us is as a bookmark directory, but delicious breaks many of the conventions of directories. Delicious is non-hierarchical and uses keywords to categorize bookmarks.

Although tagging systems are not new, delicious was the first to successfully introduce the system in a bookmarking context. And while delicious’ tagging system is powerful and extremely useful, the site’s true value only surfaces when you consider the social implications.

When you store a bookmark at delicious, the site tells you how many times that page has been bookmarked. This is extremely useful information. The more bookmarks, the more likely the page contains useful or original content. The idea is similar to Google’s weighting of pages based on the number of incoming links, except delicious measures pages we care enough about to store in our personal bookmarks.

What’s with the name?

The “del.icio.us” domain name is one of the best-known domain hacks (using an unusual combination of letters to form a word). Although the name is catchy, it is scheduled to be shelved with the release of version 2 of the site. I imagine they’re making the switch to delicious.com to make the site more accessible.

Why I use del.icio.us

With more than 3 million users and 100 million bookmarked urls, delicious is continually linking to the best of the internet.

And since delicious allows users to store both public and private bookmarks, it’s perfect for storing my professional and personal bookmarks in one place. And with their tagging system, I have multiple ways to meaningfully store and retrieve my links.

I can also explore other people’s bookmarks and tags, subscribe to tags, or explore what’s currently hot on delicious. Although exploring delicious can be entertaining, I primarily use it for research and my own bookmarks.

I also use delicious to bookmark quality articles and resources to reward the author and highlight the content for others. With splogs and spammy sites multiplying, I expect search engines to eventually tap into user ratings at social media sites. In fact, StumbleUpon already offers supplemental information about Google’s search results.

How I use del.icio.us

I prefer to use the official firefox extension which replaces firefox’s standard bookmarks with my online bookmarks (also available for IE and there are many third party tools as well). However, for those times away from my iMac, I know I can always explore my bookmarks from any web browser.

I also subscribe to a handful of investing, personal finance, and economics tags that allow me to keep track of what’s hot with delicious bookmarkers.

How del.icio.us will help you

Del.icio.us is a very flexable social bookmarking tool that can help you keep all of your online resources, articles, and sites instantly accessible. Delicious will even import your old bookmarks, applying tags based on folder names (I imported a lot of bookmarks…and I haven’t quite finished cleaning them up yet).

Even if you don’t want to take the plunge with a new method of organizing your bookmarks, head over to del.icio.us and do some searching. Or, if you’re in need of more convincing, check out the following articles that were submitted as part of the Social Media Mega Project.

• TIPS ON HOW TO USE DEL.ICIO.US @ yeepage.com
• They Used To Call It Social Bookmarking @ alltipsandtricks.com
• Del.icio.us Is The Best @ a1-fan-fun.com
• What is the best social media website? Digg, SU, Delicious, Reddit … or? @ justcreativedesign.com
• The Success Checklist I Used To Hit #1 on del.icio.us, with Resulting Screenshots @ groupwritingprojects.com
• Share Your del.icio.us Links With WordPress @ raproject.com
• Make sure to check out the Social Media Mega Project for the final collaborative results.