Do you know why it's so Del.icio.us?

Perhaps you've seen some of the links I've posted to Del.icio.us via my Facebook activity. But have you ever taken a look at Del.icio.us directly? I think it's neat and very useful, and once you know a little bit about it I'll bet you'll find it Del.icio.us, too.

Del.icio.us lets you accomplish what they call "social bookmarking." You know how to bookmark sites on your web browser ("Favorites" for you Internet Explorer users). Del.icio.us lets you save a list of bookmarks on their web site, so that you can access it from any computer on the Internet. Perhaps even more importantly, unless you specify that a bookmark is not to be shared, it is publicly available for other people to click on.

Now, why would you want other people to be able to click on your bookmarks? For one thing, it makes it easy to share web sites that you find interesting with other people. Sometimes people ask me about good, free software that I like--I guess they know I'm cheap. I have all the software that I've installed on my Macintosh, much of it free & open-source, bookmarked on on my Del.icio.us with the keyword "onmymac".

Another reason is that it helps build Del.icio.us as an incredibly relevant search engine. As much as I love Google, I find a lot of index spam on there, as well as hits that include my search terms but are really irrelevant to what I'm actually looking for. Traditional search engines index web sites automatically, and don't have the ability to determine the real value of a page. On the other hand, when you search people's public bookmarks on Del.icio.us, every hit is a page that a real human being has bookmarked because it had some value in relation to my search keywords.

When you save a bookmark on Del.icio.us, your bookmark entry will show how many other people have bookmarked the same URL. If you click on that displayed number, you can actually see who those users are, and then look at their bookmarks. Often, when I am interested enough in something to bookmark it, I will find that others who have done the same have also bookmarked other web pages that I have never seen that are closely related and just as interesting to me.

Del.icio.us has buttons you can drop on your browser's toolbar to easily create a new bookmark for the current page you are viewing. This makes it as simple as adding the bookmark to your browser directly. In fact, by using keywords wisely and abundantly, your online bookmarks become even more useful to you because of their searchability. I highly recommend the buttons to get full use of this wonderful online tool.

By the way, the URL http://Del.icio.us cleverly uses the uncommon top-level domain "dot-US". Their full domain is "icio.us." There is no "www" subdomain, but rather "Del" as the subdomain. Although it is traditional for the common entrypoint to a web site to be a "www" subdomain, this is arbitrary and unnecessary and was abandoned in order to spell "Delicious" without any "dot-com" or "www" diluting the name in the URL. Cute. If you have a lysdexic moment and can't seem to remember where to put the periods, you can also get to the same place at http://www.delicious.com. It's just not as cute.

If you find this site interesting and decide to give it a try, please let me know so I can check out your bookmarks. Mine are at Del.icio.us/fielddan.