The Mailowl Scrolls

What’s this? My previous post was just a bunch of links? This doesn’t replace blogging; what the hell is going on?

It’s called Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is the marketing term and Web 2.0 buzzword for the idea of sharing bookmarks and links; and the service I’m using is del.icio.us.

“del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website — the primary use of del.icio.us is to store your bookmarks online, which allows you to access the same bookmarks from any computer and add bookmarks from anywhere, too. On del.icio.us, you can use tags to organize and remember your bookmarks, which is a much more flexible system than folders.

You can also use del.icio.us to see the interesting links that your friends and other people bookmark, and share links with them in return. You can even browse and search del.icio.us to discover the cool and useful bookmarks that everyone else has saved — which is made easy with tags.” – What is del.icio.us?

I’ve been using del.icio.us for about 2 weeks now and I love it for 2 reasons:

1. I can share links between work and home. If there’s a link I find while researching at home that’ll be useful at work I can save it online and pick it up when I get in the office. The reverse is also true; if I’m given a link at work that is better left for home (game development tools or actual games for example) again I can save it and look at it in the comfort of my own home.

2. Save links from friends. Has this happened to you? A friend pops up on IM and says “you’ve got to check this out” and gives you a link; but you’re too busy to look and it’s not something you want to open at work anyway? (get your heads out the gutter you lot) Using del.icio.us I can save the link and look at it at my leisure later. I can even see what other people have tagged the link as (if it’s a popular link) and use them myself.

Del.icio.us comes “out the box” with IE and Firefox support and Craig has found del.icio.us buttons for the Opera browser. Putting del.icio.us buttons on your browser makes bookmarking a site for del.icio.us and retrieving those links later MUCH easier.

Another service that del.icio.us provides is the ability for it to automatically post your recent links to your blog. You fill out your blogging details (like you would for Live Writer) and it daily posts your recent links (if you have any) along with your tags and any comments you might have given the link. I see this being great functionality for technology specialists and researchers who want a painless way of sharing links with their audience.

Del.icio.us caught my attention when I was reading Armand’s blog, where he has set up del.icio.us to post his links and it posted a link on Federated Security which he had found. I’m also interested in federated security because of my research into CardSpace and it struck me that I wouldn’t have been given this link by Armand directly but because of our shared interest, here what a link that was valuable.

So try it for yourself over the course of a couple of weeks and see what you make of it.