What is del.icio.us?

What exactly is del.icio.us?

It's a "social bookmarks manager". 'Social' because anyone can see your bookmarks and you can see everyone else's. 'Bookmarks manager' because it provides a way to easily bookmark a website, add a comment if need be, and then categorize it by add a 'tag' or two. Your bookmarks are then available via an easy to use website.
What is a tag?

Tags are single-word keywords that help you group similar bookmarks together. A bookmark can have more than one tag associated to it (or none at all if required) so you can create some quite complex groups with such a simple flat hierarchy. For example, I have the BlogThis extension for Firefox that allows blogging to Blogger.com tagged with 'firefox' and 'extension'.

What else does it do?

When you have all your bookmarks publicly available online then you have some interesting options available:

* access your bookmarks from any machine with a browser.
* no need to maintain multiple lists of bookmarks for multiple machines.
* easily searchable with tags to drill-down quickly on a particular topic.
* share your bookmarks with others, who can select what tags they are interested in following.
* watch other people's bookmarks with the use of RSS feeds.
* see other bookmarks from people who have bookmarked the same URL as you.

Note: del.icio.us doesn't offer private bookmarks so don't add anything that you want to keep to yourself.

I've been using del.icio.us now for about two weeks, I've managed to upload all my bookmarks from Firefox and I now only maintain one list of bookmarks via del.icio.us. A future blog entry will detail how I managed to upload them and other tools that compliment what del.icio.us has to offer.

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, firefox, extension