I tried many titles for this post. If I had used “Why del.icio.us Is Better Than Sex” I might have upset someone. So I didn’t. Either way I got you reading…

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The value of del.icio.us is often misperceived, and it’s potential underestimated. del.icio.us is a social bookmarking application - an tool you can use to record your WWW travels so that they’re not stored on your local machine. Instead of storing your favourites in your browser, where they can easily get lost if your machine crashes or you lose data, your bookmarks are much safer on del.icio.us. Accounts are free and it’s horrendously easy to set up - I’m going to show you how…

You see, just being able to store your bookmarks remotely is not sexy enough. Being able to share them with millions of other users, and in turn being able to interrogate the collective bookmarking efforts of those millions of other del.icio.us users in a very powerful way, is.

Let me explain it this way. Imagine Einstein was alive today. Chances are he’d use the Web. Chances are he’d have found his way to del.icio.us, using it every day to record his Web surfing patterns - all the information he finds interesting, thought-provoking, inspiring, innovative and most significantly, of high quality. Wouldn’t you do anything to get your hands on that pile of information? Einstein’s collective wisdom delivered to your door?

del.icio.us allows you to see the bookmarks (the thought repositories, if you will) of any other del.icio.us user on the planet. It also allows you to filter all that collective bookmarking wisdom and effort to find the most significant, relevant results for your personal consumption. The more users creating more bookmarks filtered by more searches and more tags, the smarter the collective group wisdom is.

TAGS? What the hell are those? Well, quite simply tags are defined as (from the del.icio.us homepage): a word (or words) you use to describe a bookmark. Unlike folders (or prescribed categories), you make up tags when you need them and you can use as many as you like. The result is a better way to organize your bookmarks and a great way to discover interesting things on the Web. Wikipedia has a very comprehensive article on the subject if you want to dig deeper…

So let’s get to the good stuff. I want to show you how the most ordinary user out there can create an extraordinary library of content with del.icio.us.

1. Create an Account

Load http://del.icio.us in your browser (there’s no ‘www’ in the address). Yeah, I know it looks busy, confusing and not very pretty. But then neither did Einstein. Click on the ‘register’ link in the top right hand corner. You’ll see this…

Fill out the necessaries and click ‘register’. You’ll need to verify your email address and then you’re ready to rock and roll.

Now most people simply use del.icio.us, as I mentioned earlier, to record and categorise bookmarks. But I want to show you how to build up a knowledge fountain before you bookmark a single thing by leveraging the power of the existing del.icio.us user/knowledge base.

2. Build Your Network

Every del.icio.us user has a unique URL or Web address) for their account. My personal one is http://del.icio.us/mikestopforth. My company’s one (the one I just created with you), is http://del.icio.us/cerebra. On that page we can currently see nothing. Neither will you on your account home page.

This is because you will only start to see bookmarks here once you begin to manually add them. And this, friends, is where most user’s experience of del.icio.us ends - realising the schlep of getting into the habit of bookmarking with del.icio.us instead of using browser bookmarks and as a result, chucking the concept out the window.What they don’t realise is that you can build a mountain of info before ever adding a single bookmark manually. The first way to do this is to grow your del.icio.us network (mine is at http://del.icio.us/network/cerebra. The network concept is really simple - find other del.icio.us users who you trust, or believe will read quality content, or are thought leaders - add their names to your network and with a single click of a button receive all of THEIR bookmarks in your networks section. Wow!

So let me tell you how this was useful for me. Andrew McAfee is one of the most influential thinkers in a new movement dubbed Enterprise 2.0 (or social software in business), and just happens to be an associate professor at Harvard Business School - not a bad resource. I read his blog often and have downloaded his whitepapers. Now imagine being able to get a glimpse of what someone like Andrew is reading on a daily basis - what influences him, what he regards as important, what he believes is influential, bleeding-edge thinking. I figured if I could guess his del.icio.us username I could SEE that - and any one else I considered important or influential. Andrew doesn’t advertise his username publicly, I do, and there are no rules about whether you should publish your username or not, but there is nothing wrong or illegal about adding him to my network - by using del.icio.us he is automatically publishing his ‘thought stream’ - his IP - to the WWW. To cut a long story short, I eventually guessed his username, added him to my network and have been enjoying inspiration from his brain ever since. If only Einstein had del.icio.us…

You can add colleagues, friends or complete strangers to your network. You can read what Steve Rubel reads. Or what Seth Godin reads. Provided you can guess their usernames (or email them and ask, or search del.icio.us for it) and that they use del.icio.us in the first place, you’re sorted.

Once you’ve added a name to your network, their bookmarks will appear in the body of the page:                                                                    Original News:     mikestopforth.com

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