Thursday, February 10, 2005

del.icio.us - social bookmarking

I've been playing a bit with social bookmarking over at del.icio.us. The basic concept behind social bookmarks is that each user posts their own bookmarks, with a description and zero, one or more tags. The tags can be anything meaningful to you as an indexing aide. These bookmark lists are be shared, so you and your colleagues can share bookmarks, for example. You can also see people who have used either the same tags, or the same URL in a book mark. Thus you can find people who might share a common interest and then view bookmark lists.

I've set up my bookmark list at http://del.icio.us/tfl. Right now there's not too many entries (some users have literally thousands of entries!). But I'm sure the list is not goint to remain so small. From my bookmark page, you can see two of my bookmarks, for example, are also bookmarked by other people. You could then browse those individuals and view their bookmark lists (from where you can repeat the process ad infinietunm - or until the data/time runs out!). If on your travels, you find something interesting, you can easily copy it back to your bookmark list.

This is fantastic if you are on the road using a 3rd party terminal, etc. By using del.icio.us, my links are available to me anywhere I could probably use them! You can also share your lists with others and see what others deem useful enough to bookmark too. I'm certainly going to put the bookmarks I have setup on my home PCs onto my bookmark list!

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