Del.icio.us: Changing the way you use bookmarks

Del.icio.us is a tool that improves the way in which you handle bookmarks. Despite becoming something of an underground phenomenon, the attention it has received on the web is well deserved.

If your browsing sessions are anything like mine, a single browser tab (or window for you IE users) quickly becomes 5 or more tabs full of information/links that will no doubt spawn another 5 new tabs before long.

Traditional bookmark tools are useful for earmarking sites for later viewing, but without care, such lists can become particularly unwieldy. Even the use of folders creates problems when the category under which a link should reside is ambiguous, or the link spans a range of categories. Additionally, it’s hard to remember at a glance what information was held at a given site a few weeks down the line.

Del.icio.us solves such problems by allowing you to add tags and extended descriptions to websites you wish to read later, or archive for future reference. Multiple tags can be added for any given site. As with folders, you can browse the pages you have added under different tags as well and a search function allows you to find bookmarked pages. Being a web based service, bookmarks can be accessed whatever your location.

Not only can you manage your own links (by going to "http://del.icio.us/yourusername"), you can also view what sites others have chosen to place under your categories/tags. The public nature of the bookmarks held by Del.icio.us allows it to potentially alert users of innovative/informative sites and important news long before such things are reported on by more mainstream sources of information.

Firefox users can make use of the del.icio.us plugin for rapid bookmarking of sites.

Del.icio.us is a great tool for managing information and the active development of tools to enhance its functionality ensure it will only get better. Well worth a look.

: 24 Dec 2004 14:32 |  Tags: Computing |  Comments (1) |  Report a problem