Do you have an account on (http://) del.icio.us?

What! You say to yourself, that is a crazy name and it does not even look like a valid name for a website. Well, it is a real site with an Alexa rank of 123 which is in the stratosphere for web site rankings.

Let's use old, dependable Wikipedia for a definition of del.icio.us:

"The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!"

A social bookmarking site is one where you can establish an account and store your favorites. You can make these bookmarks private for your own use, or make them available to anyone on the Web.

You have your favorites listed in folders on your browser, but that information is available only to you on your home computer. If you open a bookmark site (and there are many others in addition to del.icio.us), you can share these bookmarks with any reader on the Web.

Why do this? One reason is that you can access your bookmarks from any computer with an Internet connection so you can get to your bookmarks when you are traveling.

However, the major reason is to help build traffic to your websites. Use of bookmarking sites is a way to create links back to your websites and help generate traffic. There are numerous bookmark sites and you can set up bookmark files on as many as you want, all of which create the links back to your websites.

The best way to learn about social bookmarking is to open an account on del.icio.us and learn about the site. You definitely need to know about it and how to use it to your advantage.

About the author: John V. W. Howe is an entrepreneur, author, inventor, patent holder, husband, father, and grandfather. He has been involved in entrepreneurial activities for over 40 years. He founded http://www.boomer-ezine.com and http://www.retirement-jobs-online.com to help Boomers (baby boomers) become entrepreneurs when they retire.

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Some days, it seems that we are quickly evolving from a digital world where information was THE marketable commodity to a communications market, where new methods of communicating, networking and socializing are being introduced on a rapid fire basis and are the new consumers of online attention and time. Blogs, wikis, RSS newsfeeds, podcasts, video socialization built around applications like YouTube...all of these are recently formulated methods of communication that seemingly overnight have developed millions of participants.

One of the networking methodologies that has evolved from Internet architecture is the phenomenon of "social bookmarking." One of the more popular sites is del.icio.us. On this site the notion is that you, the web surfer, share interests with others who have web access via your bookmarked URLs. It's the same concept as bookmarking favorites with your browser, but the collection of favorites has a coding system and is shared with others. You build a library of URLs that reflect your interests and that you consider worth visiting. You add a personal "tag" with a keyword that characterizes the site.

You can "subscribe" to tags so that you see every new post with that tag. That in turn can take you to the poster's entire list of favorites which may prove to be a new trove of information for you. del.icio.us allows you to go through the same exercise with podcasts, which are now scattered across the Internet galaxy like asteroids.

Others on the web have access to your library and thus to your personal interests. Utilizing a web based application (in this case, del.icio.us) participants are able to search through sites that others have bookmarked, using not only a standard search term but the tag that has been used to characterize the site. Tags form a collective body of URLs and thus, a body of knowledge - and collective access to those tags forms a community of people with common interests. Included in the process is an optional personal profile, which provides your email address and allow others to communicate with you personally.

One of the drawbacks to this format is that a tag search is going to get you every commercial website out there who has laid claim to the same keyword. It takes a lot of scanning and scrolling to find sites that have been tagged by individuals instead of search engines.

There are several platforms out there for social networking. Flickr (www.flickr.com) is a site that uses uploaded photos for networking purposes instead of URLs. www.43places.com is a site where you upload your travel experiences, travel photos and travel interests along with your profile. Wists (www.wists.com) is a "social shopping" exchange where the bookmarks are all about commercial shopping sites. The level of personal communication allowed by social networking sites is up to you: on 43 Places you can post your photo but refuse personal email. You can also hold the line at public access to your favorites library on del.icio.us. Other social bookmarking platforms (or tools) as they are called, include:
- Backflip
- Blinklist
- blogmarks
- Connotea
- de.lirio.us
- feedmarker
- Jots
- Lookmarks
- Scuttle
- unalog
- Spurl
- Simpy
- Wists
- Yahoo! My Web 2.0

They all have an assortment of tricks and widgets that make their sites a little different. Some of them have fairly sophisticated search methods for their subscribed users; some allow you to "bundle" tags for search purposes; most provide lists of the most popular bookmarks and the recent posts. It's all an interesting experiment in 'distance sharing'. Making use of it for professional (research) or personal uses simply requires taking the time to become comfortable with the methodology and then learning how to get maximum usage out of the tagging system.

About the author: Madison Lockwood is a customer relations associate for http://www.apollohosting.com. She helps clients understand how a website may benefit them both personally and professionally. Apollo Hosting provides website hosting, ecommerce hosting, & VPS hosting to a wide range of customers

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