Social Bookmarking

Although delicious and other social bookmarking sites are promoted as web 2.0 social networking applications, these sites are also very useful for personal use alone. By storing your bookmarked websites online, they are available from any Internet connected computer. In the past I have struggled with two different sets of "favorites" - one at work and one at home. With a social bookmarking site I can consolidate my home and work favorites lists and have access from anywhere from any computer.

The "social" part of bookmarking is related to establishing networks and sharing bookmarks. If you have friends or co-workers with which you share a common interest you can add them to you bookmarking network. This allows you directly access all of their networks and view sites that they have bookmarked. Once a person is in your network you can easily forward a bookmark that you find interesting directly to them. This creates a collaborative network for finding an sharing websites related to shared interests

Delicious Features

Tags

Another web 2.0 feature of social bookmarking is the creation of new information. This is done using tags and notes which you supply when you bookmark a website. Tags are one word labels that identify the contents in a bookmarked site. In some ways it is like the file folder paradigm in computer file organization. The difference is that a single bookmark can have multiple tags and effectively be in multiple "folders". Like any good organizational tool the question is not "Where can I put this?" but rather, "Where can I find this later?" Tags can be organized into "bundles" which might be compared to file cabinet for tags. Just like a single website may have multiple tags (folders) a tag can be "bundled" into more than one bundle (file cabinet).

Tags also create a kind of classification system or folksonomy. By adding tags the users create metadata that describes the web content. This folksonomy helps other users to efficiently find the information for which they are searching.

When adding bookmarks you also have the opportunity to add your own notes. These notes can not only be helpful to you when you return to a bookmark after several months but can also be helpful to anyone who might view your bookmarks.

Subscriptions

According to the delicious website "Subscriptions are a way to see the recent bookmarks that everybody has saved with the tags that you're interested in. After you add a tag to your subscriptions, the latest bookmarks for that tag will appear on this page. You can subscribe to multiple tags to create an automatically updated list of interesting bookmarks.

"Subscriptions allow you to watch all your favorite tags in one place. After you add a tag to your subscriptions, Delicious watches for everyone's bookmarks saved with that tag and delivers them to your subscriptions page. It's really a "tag aggregator", good for watching what people are bookmarking about a favorite topic or series of topics."

Subscriptions can help keep you up to date on the latest information available concerning topic in which you are interested. Like tag bundles, subscriptions can also be bundled to aid in organization of your information.

People Counter

When viewing bookmarks there is a count of people that have tagged the site already. This number can be helpful for determining the popularity and possible reliability of the site's tag.