del.icio.us discovered, enjoyed and used
February 16th, 2005
del.icio.us - One of the hottest new web concepts was discovered by me just a week or two ago.
The concept is amazingly simple - The site allow you to post site bookmarks, and assign one or more tags to it.
The tag is any word that you wish. For example, I've tagged Slashdot with the following words: News Computers Internet Technology Daily Geek.
del.icio.us presents your list of all the tags you have ever assigned to your bookmarks. By clicking a tag (Say: Computers) you get all the sites that belong to that "category".
I know this sounds very simplistic, but after you use it for a bit, and build-up a nice list of sites and tags, it is simply an amazing tool!
Remember that essentialy what you get is a semantic, smart, online bookmarks (or "favorites"), that you can access from any computer.
Again - You'll never grasp the coolness factor until you've actually played with it for a while.
In the few days I've been working with del.icio.us, I've already built up a list of, as of writing this, 77 bookmarks. It's here.
Moreover, since my site is brand new, I didn't have any real traffic so far. Posting a few of my articles has already brought me a couple of hundred visits in just a few short days.
So del.icio.us is now very popular and many people are examining the concept's potential.
For further reading and explanations - I was introduced to del.icio.us by this article, a very strighforward explanation of what del.icio.us is and how to use it.
But people have done much more than just tag sites…
For instance, extisp.icio.us actually displays a graphic image of all your tags, according to their proportions to one another.
Here is mine:
And there are many more tools out there. One nice page is this one, that collect tons of these tools.
And finally of course, a great use for del.icio.us is with webmastering, handling the links of a web site - And as you can probably see, I've used it myself and built a menu of all my links, sorted by tags.
I had to do a little research until I've managed to implement this with the Mambo CMS - But I'll describe that in a future post… 
