Social bookmarking

Share your bookmarks with others (& with yourself). Work at one computer at work, and another at home? Ever needed a bookmark that's on the other computer? Or have you ever tried sharing a list of weblinks with someone else?  Try del.icio.us , which allows you to set up a free account where you store links to websites with your own customized tags (descriptors).

If you're clever you already have your dozens (hundreds?) of bookmarks organized into folders in your web browser's bookmarks/favorites menu, so you already have some idea about tagging. With del.icio.us you can add several tags to a single bookmark, and you can make up the tags as you go along.  Your website lists then show up as a webpage; the list of sites that corresponds to each of your tags is basically a separate webpage with its own url.

Here's an example: A colleague asked for my help in finding websites that students could use when planning for university study in the U.S. I did some searching on the net and used del.icio.us to tag the sites that looked most useful.  To see the result, just click  here. 

When you're done, go back to the top of the page and click on my username (themingway) to see all my bookmarks, or click on another one of the tags in the list on the right side of the del.icio.us screen.  And  (surprise!) you can subscribe to an RSS feed for either the entire list or for any one of my tags, so you'll know if I have added more sites to one of the lists.

To find other social bookmarking services like del.icio.us, check out this list from Wikipedia.

Update (05/2006): Elise at Simply Recipes writes how to use del.icio.us tags to organize recipes online, sorting them by ingredients, nationality, or whatever system she wants. Since del.icio.us is social, she can share her bookmarks with other recipe collectors. Click here to read Elise's blog post and join her del.icio.us network.

[[wiki:researchtools:delicious blog post]]