Tzetze Fly

Del.icio.us is one of the most useful web sites I’ve started using in the past couple of years. At it’s simplest level, it’s a way to move your web bookmarks out of your browser and into the internet “cloud” so that they are accessible on any computer you use. In the old days (that’s three years ago), you’d bookmark important sites on your office computer, then when you were at your home computer and you needed that site, you were out of luck. Now, with all your bookmarks in del.icio.us, you can get to those from anywhere. The site is free and now owned by Yahoo.

At a deeper level, you can tag every bookmark with keywords and add a description. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this makes them easy to find by a simple search box. In a sense, you’re creating your own little personal search engine - all sites you’ve bookmarked are now searchable by tag and by description. Bookmarks are public by default, but can be marked private for your logged in eyes only.

The format of del.icio.us urls are very straightforward - this is where the real power starts to come into play. To find all sites I’ve tagged with “ruby”, just go to:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/ruby

Del.icio.us calls itself “social bookmarking” and this example shows that off - all public bookmarks you make are easily accessible to others. Now when a friend asks you for information about web hosting companies, you can just send him a link that looks like this:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/web+hosting

and he’ll see everything you’ve tagged “web hosting” during your web surfing over the past year.

You can even access an RSS feed for these public bookmarks. If someone you trust is always uncovering juicy tidbits about real estate that are worth checking out, subscribe to their feed (for example) using:

http://del.icio.us/rss/donaldtrump/real+estate

Now every time they tag a page using those tags, it will appear in your blog reader.

Rather than a specific user’s bookmarks, you can look at those of the entire del.icio.us user base. Remember, these are sites that have been specifically marked by a human being as having useful information. For specific subjects, this can be even more relevant than general search sites like Google. The site has a very usable UI for searching, but here are some sample url shortcuts you can go to directly:

Sites tagged “web hosting” - http://del.icio.us/tag/web+hosting

Popular sites - http://del.icio.us/popular

Popular sites tagged “ruby” - http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby

As a Realtor, you could do something like tag listings that you’d like your buyers - the Robertson’s - to see at remax.com, then just e-mail them a single link - for example:

http://del.icio.us/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

or allow them to subscribe to a feed in their blog reader - for example :

http://del.icio.us/rss/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

Now whenever you bookmark a new listing and tag it “Robertson”, they will see it. You can even tag other pertinent information you want them to read, like articles about mortgage rates, schools in the area, market conditions, etc, and they will all appear in their blog reader.

If you’re using Firefox, there is a very useful extension available here. It puts a couple of buttons in your toolbar that make it super simple to bookmark any page and bring up your list of bookmarks without having to open the del.icio.us site.

Del.icio.us also has very good developer tools you can read about here. I’ll be showing off one of those in my next post.