del.icio.us

Nigel De Silva - nigel.desilva@thomasmiller.com

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del.icio.us Homepage

Wikipedia entry

Review

The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking, web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks. You can bookmark interesting websites (or articles, documents, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, etc) and categorize them with multiple tags.

You can then access your bookmarks from any computer attached to the web (i.e. at home or at work).

You can see who else has bookmarked a particular page and if they are interested in the same site as you, the chances are thet you may find one of their favourites useful. This feature is useful for online research.

The ability to tag bookmarks with multiple tags provides the most interesting feature of this service. For example you may tag this paper on reserving, by Zehnwirth, with the following tags: actuarial, reserving, papers, GLMs, etc. Suppose later you wanted to locate this paper; searching with any combination of the previous tags would work. This is particularly useful when you have lots of bookmarks.

The access to other people’s public bookmarks extends this feature. The more people have found a website useful, the more times it will have been tagged and the greater chance it will be useful to you. Therefore searching for a tag and listing the results by the number of times that website has been tagged can return much more relevant and useful results than a similar search in an alternative search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Ordering the results by date provides the most recent bookmarks and perhaps the latest information.

As well as storing your favourites, a del.icio.us account also has an inbox. This is used for sharing bookmarks with friends, family or colleagues, by tagging sites for one another. Just tag a bookmark with for: (e.g. for:maynardt) and it will be sent to their inbox.

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