I’ve decided recently to get into some of those social bookmarking type sites: del.icio.us, digg, Technorati, etc. You can see what I’ve done through my feeds and profile links on my home page.
In summary:
- del.icio.us is pretty cool
- digg is a bit of a waste of time
- What does Technorati actually do again?
To anyone who hasn’t taken advantage of social bookmarking sites yet, I’d strongly recommend checking out del.icio.us. As someone who uses multiple computers every day (work PC, home PC, and laptop), I warmly welcome an easy way of sharing my many bookmarks. A Firefox extension plugs right in and makes bookmarking as easy as it has always been.
To anyone who hasn’t come across the concept of ‘tagging’ before, del.icio.us lets you tag your links to enable you to quickly find them later. For example, I might tag a link on Firefox vulnerabilities as “browser, firefox, security”. This way, I can see at a glance all the links I have saved in these categories. New ‘categories’/'tags’ are created each time I save a new page with that tag. A common tag is something like ‘toread’ when one comes across something that looks great… but that they don’t have the time to delve into at that point.
‘Keywords’ is another good term to use to describe the tag idea, actually.
As far as the social side of del.icio.us goes, I haven’t really looked into it that much yet. There is a ‘network’ feature, where you can subscribe to links saved by multiple other people that you like, and the front page of del.icio.us also shows what’s hot right now. You can also see how many other people have saved the links you’ve saved, and each time you save a link del.icio.us uses previous saves to recommend the best tags to you.
As for digg, all it really consists of is people finding good stories, posting them, and then other people “digging” them if they like them. The most popular current stories are shown on the digg home page, thus giving them more exposure for the limited time that they’re up there. Stories range from all sorts of things such as images of the sun to 31 ways to tie your shoe laces, and from Firefox memory usage to the new CEO of Pepsi.
If you have a lot of spare time on your hands, then digg sure is a way to come across some interesting stories. If you don’t have that time though, I’d recommend spending it on something a little more productive.
Over the next short while I’ll be posting more about the sites I’ve been coming across recently. There’s so many great free things out there that people either don’t hear about, or couldn’t be bothered trying because they don’t know how to use them. I’m going to talk about and document some features of these services, to hopefully steer more people towards using them. 
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