I’ll confess that it’s taken a while, but I’ve finally clicked with the concept of del.icio.us. In case you’re unfamiliar with the site, del.icio.us is a combination of bookmark filing and group metadata – that’s to say, it’s a site where you can store links to web resources, and provide ‘tags’, or keywords, to describe what the link is all about.
Although that’s neat on two counts – it’s quite useful to have your bookmarks stored online so you can get at them if you’re away from your main system; and being able to ‘tag’ the links means that it’s easy to provide some detail about why you’ve bookmarked the site in the first place – it’s not particularly revolutionary until you consider the social aspects of del.icio.us.
Go back to the concept of the tags for a second. Let’s say I come across a site which appears to be the definitive resource on three-toed ringtailed lemurs, and I want to bookmark it for future reference. Using the del.icio.us bookmarklet, I capture the URL and save it to my del.icio.us account. There’s a couple of fields for a free-text description, so I add a little bit of detail about the site and why I’ve saved the link. Then I add tags.
These are simply one-word keywords that describe my classification of the link – so in this case, I’m going to give the three-toed ringtailed lemur portal the keywords of ‘lemurs‘ and ‘animals‘, and then because it’s a personal interest of mine, ‘personal‘. So now the link is not only saved, but classified – I can filter the thousands of links that I collect over a period of time to see only those that relate to ‘lemurs’ or ‘animals’ or ‘personal’, and so on.
What makes del.icio.us really clever is two additional things that happen in the background. Firstly, the system can search all the links that it stores – so anyone else saving a link with the word ‘lemur’ will be able to see the site I’ve just added if they search on that word. So in effect it becomes a meta-search engine – I’m able to search across links that other people have already decided are worthy of bookmarking.
Secondly, del.icio.us provides an RSS feed of all the links in each tag category. So if I use a tag called ‘follow-up’ to classify links that I’m going to revisit with a view to blogging about, anyone who subscribes to the RSS feed for that tag will see a posting for each new site that I tag with that keyword.
Putting the two together makes del.icio.us potentially extremely useful in a collaborative working environment. For example, as there are two of us who post to this blog on a regular basis, we can easily share links that one of us thinks we should mention in a posting. And if we use similar keywords to tag links, we can aggregate our individual links together into a combined pool of all things lemur-related, for example.
And there’s also the hours of endless amusement to be had from watching the links that others are contributing – because there are feeds for each tag, it becomes very easy to keep an eye on the lemur-related links that other people are coming across. Of course, what you do with all this additional information is another matter – but it’s a great example of how a technology like RSS can be used in every-more ingenious ways.
