How Do You Use Del.icio.us?

By Roland Piquepaille

Many of you already know and use del.icio.us, this free social software web service for sharing web bookmarks launched a few months ago by Joshua Schachter. Here is a quick reminder of what del.icio.us is about. It allows you to bookmark a web page you find interesting, to organize these pages by categories, using tags of your choice, and to share your discoveries with other curious minds. But you can do much more. When Jon Udell, currently with InfoWorld, published a series of articles about del.icio.us on his blog, this gave me an idea: categorize all the entries posted on my blog in the last thirty months. Instead of using a search engine to check if or when I already wrote about something, I'm now using my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag. Remarkably fast and useful! And you, how are you using this service? Have you discovered other tricks easing your online life? Please post your comments below. And many thanks to Joshua Schachter. Read more...

Before going further, here are the two first paragraphs from the what del.icio.us is about page.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.
Once you've registered for the service, you add a simple bookmarklet to your browser (see below). When you find a web page you'd like to add to your list, you simply select the del.icio.us bookmarklet, and you'll be prompted for a information about the page. You can add descriptive terms to group similar links together, modify the title of the page, and add extended notes for yourself or for others.

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You also can read the description made by Wikipedia.

With such a description, I subscribed to the service in its first days of existence and I found it very useful. But when Jon Udell published several entries on his blog, I thought that del.icio.us could be used in other ways.

Here are the links to Jon Udell's entries about the service.

After reading these Udell's entries, I'm sure you'll agree with him that you can use del.icio.us for other purposes than social bookmarking.

Here is what I did. I read all the entries I posted on my blog since March 31, 2002, in chronological order, and I assigned a category to all these stories. Now, I have a full archive of all my posts.

Before del.icio.us, if I wanted to know if I already wrote about a specific subject, I used PicoSearch or Google. But a search by word is not always efficient. Now, I open my del.icio.us archive and I click on a tag.

For example, I can click on the "Nanotechnology" tag and I'm immediately carried to this page which contains the links to all the entries I put in this specific category.

And because I introduced all my entries in chronological order, del.icio.us displays them in a reverse chronological one, the most recent stories being the first shown.

There is even an additional benefit for me, who uses the Radio UserLand software to publish my blog. If I want to publish a story on both the main page and in a specific category, I need to have the story duplicated. With this usage of del.icio.us, I can enjoy the categorization of stories without doubling the disk space I'm using.

If you read this post, I'm sure you already understood that I highly recommend the del.icio.us web service. And I really want to say a big "Thank you" to Joshua Schachter.

Now, what about you? Have you found other creative or innovative ways to use del.icio.us? Please post your comments below.

Sources: Roland Piquepaille, November 8, 2004; del.icio.us website and various other ones

Previous entries related to this story can be found in these del.icio.us categories.