Sheri Larsen’s Flying Cloud

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Why use Delicious

Delicious (http://www.del.icio.us.com) is a social bookmarking tool. You can use it to save links (or bookmarks) to sites you want to find later or that you want to let others know about. Each bookmark can be assigned one or more tags as well as a summary or some notes. While you can save favorites in your browser of choice, Delicious allows you to access your bookmarks from any computer (yours or someone else’s), to save links for other Delicious members, and to create an organizational structure for your links by using tags.

As a result Delicious can be used to feed information to your colleagues by saving links for them or suggesting that they subscribe to your bookmarks using an RSS reader. Your colleagues can subscribe to all your bookmarks or just to those assigned to certain tags. Because it has many plugins and widgets, Delicious can be used to augment your online personal brand by integrating your bookmark feed into your Facebook profile and by posting them on your blog.

Getting Started

First, create an account using your online username and upload your picture or avatar. As I mentioned in Getting Started with Twitter for B2B Marketing, for branding purposes it’s important to use the same username (if possible) and picture throughout your online presence. This helps your fans to recognize you from site to site.

Second, install the browser toolbar. During the installation your existing browser bookmarks are uploaded to Delicious and tagged with the folder name where they were found. I haven’t tired the IE extension, but the Firefox Addin allows you right click on any page and save it to your Delicious account. It also allows you to view and manage your bookmarks from within your browser in a window on the left.

• Firefox Addin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3615

• Internet Explorer Extension - http://del.icio.us/help/ie/extension

• The buttons (bookmarklets) (http://del.icio.us/help/buttons) are links you add to your browser’s Bookmarks Toolbar. They are better than nothing, but no nearly as useful as the full toolbar integration.

Third, start saving and tagging the sites you like. You can use any tags you like to organize your bookmarks. Each bookmark can be given as many tags as you think make sense so you can find it again when you need it. Tags must be a single “word” but you can combine words into phrases by using capital letters or punctuation, for example - web2.0 or personal_branding or SocialMedia.

Saving Private Bookmarks

By default all bookmarks are public and available to anyone that comes to look at your bookmarks, are included in the public feed, and are posted in any syndication you set up. However, you can turn on the ability to mark certain bookmarks as private by clicking on the “settings” link (in the upper right of the page) and then on “private saving” under the Bookmarks heading.

Managing Bookmarks and Tags

Over time your bookmarks and tags will start to add up so you will need to go through them to delete and reorganize. This is much easier to do using a browser addin than on the Delicious site. You can view your tags on the Delicious site as an alphabetical list, as a tag cloud or in bundles. I like to bundle related tags together to make browsing through my tags easier. I find that managing my bundles is actually easier on the Delicious site. You can get to the bundle manager from a link in the bottom right or from the “settings” link.

Syndication

There are a number of ways to leverage your Delicious bookmarks around your social networking profiles. I’ve included links to several collections of tools at the end of this post, but the two I recommend implementing immediately are the Facebook application and a feed to your blog.

• The Facebook Application lets you display your bookmarks as a headline feed.
• Wordpress has several Plugins and widgets at http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Delicious.

A cool feature that I played around with was the daily blog post “thingy” which can be found in the Delicious settings. It creates a blog post of all the links you saved in the last 24 hours and posts it automatically to your blog. The trickiest thing about setting it up was figuring out the out_url and the out_time. Theory is the Reason provides very helpful instructions for WordPress in From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links. I decided to turn it off as there were many sites I saved for work or for fun that weren’t really on target for my blog. But it may be possible to export only bookmarks associated with a particular tag. Any ideas about fine tuning this tool would be appreciated!

Discovery

You can subscribed to a feed for any Delicious page by clicking on the “RSS feed for this page” at the bottom of any page. Others can use this link to subscribe to your posts and you can use it to subscribe to anyone else’s posts or to posts with a specific tag. I subscribe to the Hotlist and to “links for me”. I’ve tried other general Delicious tags but there are just too many posts to keep up with. Many The Hotlist contains the most saved posts on Delicious and can be strange but interesting.

Resources

http://del.icio.us/sllarsen - My bookmarks on Delicious

http://del.icio.us/rss/ - Feed for the Hotlist

The Official Delicious blog

Us.ef.ul - A beginner’s guide to the Next Big Thing from Beelerspace

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users from Slacker Manager

Become a Del.icio.us Power User from Web Worker Daily

Top 10 Ways to Use del.icio.us from LifeHack.org

Tools

del.icio.us A-to-Z by Functions: All 150+ hacks from eConsultant

DEL.ICIO.US TOOLBOX: 180+ Del.icio.us Tools and Resources from Mashable

Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection from Quick Online Tips

From Del.icio.us to WordPress: How to automatically post daily links from Theory is the Reason

Facebook Application

WordPress Plugins

Firefox Addin

Internet Explorer Extension

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