del.icio.us

by Emily Rimland, Reference Librarian, Penn State University Libraries.
For details, contact: erimland@psu.edu

Here’s the situation: You discover a great web site while working in your office and quickly bookmark it in your browser as you dash off to a meeting. Later, you are at a reference desk and want to view that site again but you don’t remember the exact name and can’t seem to locate it. After a busy day, you sit down at your home computer, try to find that site again, but alas, it still evades you.

If you have ever found yourself in this situation, a tasty little web-based treat called del.icio.us might satisfy your bookmarking appetite.

Features
del.icio.us (a peculiar domain name indeed, found at http://del.icio.us/) is a social bookmarking site. This means you can use it to save and organize your bookmarks online, which lets you access them from any computer. del.icio.us sets your bookmarks free—no longer do they need to be tethered to one computer!

If this feature alone doesn’t make del.icio.us one of the best web-based tools since webmail, it also allows you to create your own tags to organize all your bookmarks. Tags are one-word descriptions you add to bookmarked sites to group and organize them. You can almost think of tagging as your own home-grown Library of Congress classification system.

A final feature of del.icio.us gives it its social component. If you choose, you can make your collection of bookmarks public so that your friends, co-workers, and family can see what you’re bookmarking. Conversely, you can search to find what other people find interesting enough to bookmark. You can use del.icio.us to collaborate on a project, discover more about a hobby, or simply for serendipitous browsing.

Already have your bookmarks organized in your browser? del.icio.us has an import feature. It also has handy toolbar buttons that make posting new sites to your free del.icio.us account even easier.

del.icio.us is a fun, easy-to-use, web 2.0 tool that will make your web life much easier and more efficient. Go ahead, try it—it’s delicious!

Check out the getting started page at: http://del.icio.us/help/getstarted

del.icio.us lets you organize, share, and discover bookmarks