Social Bookmarking and Research With Delicious

Social bookmarking is just that, online collaboration for bookmarking pages. Although Del.icio.us has been around for a few years, many people don’t use it to its fullest extent and many people don’t use Del.icio.us at all. I will take a few minutes and explore ways of using Del.icio.us for purposes beyond the obvious. Before I do that lets talk about the obvious. In addition to what is discussed here you can also read an article listed on Mahalo about using “Del.icio.us like a pro”.

Del.icio.us is a great tool, it can be used as a simple bookmarking application and more. Here is how it works, you find a site that you either like or want to return to and bam you add it to your Del.icio.us list with one of the many applications listed on this post found on Mashable. I personally use the Delicious extension for Firefox, its on my browser tool bar and is the easiest to use for me.

One of the benefits of social bookmarking is that you eliminate the need to save new bookmarks every time you get a new computer. It’s a great way to store your bookmarks on one server so that you have one bookmark list that is accessible on any computer you use. Simple and effective.

Another way that you can use Del.icio.us is to search for data that has been saved by other people. At its essence that is why it is considered a social bookmarking tool. You can access millions of peoples bookmark lists and filter out a large portion of the web that many people have already deemed not worthy to return to in the future. When you search, the data is recalled from the list of tags and descriptions that individuals leave concerning the bookmark. Listed next to the title and link you can find the number of people that have added the same link to their bookmarks.

One way that Delicious is used (though not as frequently) is to monitor the bookmarking activities of individual tags and users. At first glance it may not sound valuable until you consider ways the information may be useful. If you know of a user that is an expert in their own field you can add the user to your network on Del.icio.us and have easy to access to “referral” sites that the individual felt like bookmarking. I have a couple different Del.icio.us accounts and use each one for different purposes. Don’t expect your network to bookmark all of their favorite sites, some sites that are returned to frequently are committed to memory.

Search Engines like Google and Yahoo can return millions of results for a particular query. Chances are you rarely look past the first page of results. With Delicious the results are present because they have been found to be relevant by other users. You eliminate many of the results that you would normally find within the search engines. The higher the number of people that have added the page to De.lici.us the more popular the page may be. De.lici.us elminates a lot of search work and gives you superior results.

Rather than lookup the same information repeatedly take some time and learn how to leverage RSS. There are simply ways to use it and it saves tons of time. How do you use RSS? what are your favorite ways? If you would recommend a particular 3rd party Delicious application which one would it be?