Featured

7 Ways To Use del.icio.us To The Fullest

By Ian ⋅ December 12, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Subscribe By Email ⋅ Post a comment

First things first. Are you using del.icio.us? If not, start immediately. If so, skip down to my list. This is not a paid ad, nor do I benefit by promoting this service. I simply believe it will save you a tremendous amount of time and energy finding, and saving incredible sites. You can not and will not spend the time and energy using the Bookmark menu folder system to save good sites right. You will try, but inevitably you will get too many folders, poorly filed bookmarks you will never find again, among other organizational problems. Worse yet, you can only use them on one computer!

del.icio.us solves these problems and offers much more. To take full advantage of it, you need to use it frequently, and to do this you need to make it convenient for yourself. The best way to do this is to use Firefox and install the del.icio.us Firefox plugin. This really is a must. It install two buttons in your toolbar allowing you to easily save pages whenever you see something you like. The other button allows your to find your bookmarks easily. If you want to read more about how del.icio.us works, read here or here.

That’s it to get going. Now on to WHY you should do this, beyond the basic reasons mentioned above.

1. Use a toread tag. Ever find articles you don’t have time to read? I do nearly every day. Some days though I do have time and desire to read many of the backlogged articles I didn’t have time to read. Sometimes I print them out and put them into a three ring binder with page protectors so I can read them on the subway, plane, train, or just waiting around. Tagging articles with a tag (toread) for this is great so you can easily grab those articles whenever you want. No more sending emails to yourself with links or bookmarking your articles at work, only to not be able to find them again on your home computer. Check out which pages people are using it to save.

2. Use todo, tovisit, totry, toeat tags. These tags are the same premise as the ‘toread’ tag. That makes this method a little redundant, but it offers another level of productivity and organization for sites and articles you find. You can of course use many other verbs in tags you want to save for future reference.

3. Follow the crowd. If you looking for a cool site to find gifts, what do you do? Most people don’t have a good answer for this, and will just try to search terms they think might bring up good sites. One might try gifts, best gift sites, or great gifts, which all yield terrible, boring, corporate results. There ARE great alternatives to these lousy results by using methods other than search engines. Namely social bookmarking. Since we’re talking about del.icio.us, and it’s a great solution, take a look at these results compared to Google’s. There is no comparison. The top three sites I get using del.icio.us are a gift guide by Lifehacker, Tastebook’s site, and Uncommongoods; all of which are great sites and fit what I want very well. They also are sensitive to time and recent finds. Google gives me gifts.com, findgift.com, and Amazon’s gift section. Not totally off, but essentially boring results.

This works for nearly any word, but since del.icio.us runs on tags it works particularly well when you are using one word as a query. It gives you the sites people are saving, which by default generally means they like the site and want to go back. Additionally, as I briefly mentioned above, the results are weighted on time as well as number of saves. Try comparing the results between del.icio.us and your favorite search engine using terms like: recipes, zen, lifehacks, productivity, opensource, space, or any other one of your favorite topics.

4. Follow A Leader. What if the crowd doesn’t seem to know a lot about what you are seeking, or you don’t like the results from the crowd or a search engine? OR what if you want to find sites only people you deem experts think are quality? You can do this in del.icio.us by looking at the saved pages of one particular user. All you need to do is add the username to the domain name like this http://del.icio.us/iem2509 (iem2509 is my username). Boom! You now can follow what other people are saving. Now you just need to find someone who reads the same type of content you do, and finds articles you like. This task isn’t as bad as it seems…

A. Find an article you like on del.icio.us that you feel fits into one of the topics you like to read about

B. Click on the link that tells you how many people saved that page. eg. saved by 1335 other people This will show you the people that saved it, tags they used, notes they use for it, and the first person to post it.

C. Now look through the users and see if they have a pattern of finding and saving sites or articles you like

Find a few good people and now you now a great source of page, articles, and sites. I like to follow the SEO guru and author of SEO Book, Aaron Wall ( http://del.icio.us/seobook ).

5. Share Your Favorites. Do you find yourself sending email to a bunch of people with just a link in the body? Worse yet, do you want to share what you read or saw but don’t feel like opening up your email client and sending to everyone you want? There’s a better solution. You guessed it, using del.icio.us. Once you befriend other users in del.icio.us you can tag pages not only with regular tags, but also with your friends usernames in the format “for:iem2509″ (the Firefox plugin does this for you and the recommended tags for that matter). Now you can easily send and receive your friends favorite sites without having to send emails, instant messages, or telephone calls. One drawback here is that you need to get your friends to use del.icio.us first.

6. Track Your Competition. Have your own website or have competitors with sites? Every time you come across a competitor of yours, save their site under “competitor” or “competition”. You now are a building list of your competitors you can check once in a while. Better yet, find their del.icio.us username and see what they’re saving!

7. Look for clients. First save all of your clients under “clients” and make sure to make it a private bookmark of yours. Same thing goes here as the competitors, if you can find their usernames, see what they read, and ADVERTISE THERE!

Feel free to comment with your favorite del.icio.us tips. I hope you learned something from and enjoyed this post.

Please subscribe to my blog for more great posts and save this post in del.icio.us!