del.icio.us

The del.icio.us web-site calls itself "social bookmarking", but I find it useful as a personal tool. It is a centralized book-marking ("tagging") service.


I use 3 different computers at different times of the day. I also use both the Firefox and IE browser. So, I have 6 places I can save favorites/bookmarks. Having moved to using RSS, I have no need to bookmark my favorite blogs. And, Google is so good that I hardly need to bookmark web-sites; e.g. one can simply type "PHP Documentation" and find it; no need to book-mark it as a "favorite".


That still leaves a two types of sites that I want to remember for short-term and long-term reasons. First, there are some difficult-to-find ones (e.g. most IBM software documentation), or (say) a news-article that shows some aspect about religion, but probably would not come up on Google's first few pages.

Second, are things that I want to mark as reminders that I come back to. Sometimes, simply to mark them as "read" or "tell wifey" or "tell son" or "tell colleague". That way, at the right moment, I simply pull them up on the screen. Similarly, if I'm thinking about a topic (say, China), I start bookmarking interesting articles that I find. Then, a few months later, I have a useful collection.

I also use it to make other lists. For instance, over time, I've scanned through the Gutenberg catalog, from A through Z. I bookmark interesting books as "GUTENBERG", so that I've ended up with a list that I can return to later. The same with the audio-texts at Librivox.

Another use: Forum software will let you bookmark a topic and get reminders about it. Sometimes, however, I simply want to bookmark an interesting post so that I can use read it later. I just del.icio.us to tag it "OONET" and I know it's there when I need it.

Anyone with multiple computers or home and work computers will probably find some value in centralized bookmarks.