Earthling

Del.icio.us, and sites like it, are usually referred to as "social bookmarking" or "server-side boomarking". It's a different way to keep track of web sites you find that you want to remember later. I don't mean the five web sites you find yourself using all the time -- you can leave those wherever you keep them. I mean the Weird News links people send you, articles you don't have time to read just then, recipes you want to hold on to for later, new shopping sites you want to try some time, a new youtube video, etc.

It's your overstuffed, George Costanza wallet of annotated links. But unlike Costanza's wallet, your online bookmarking account can stay pretty organized pretty easily, because each time you add a link you are encouraged to "tag" it with a word that describes what it is. You pick the word or words. And then the tags become like an overlapping folder system. Anytime you want to pull up everything you classified as "heh," you go to your online bookmarks page and click your "heh" tag. There they are. If you tagged some of them "heh" and "serious," they will show up in both "heh" and "serious". I'd be sunk without it.

Incidentally, the practice of tagging is everywhere now. I first started using it on Del.icio.us, but Flickr and Amazon and Google are all making use of it in one form or another.

And because all of the information is stored on a separate web site instead of on your computer, you can get to your account from any internet connection. You log in using a username and password, and can set your browser to log in automatically on future visits. Or not. So you can use the same set of bookmarks from work and from home, and you can view and add to them no matter where you are.

You can add new sites by clicking a special bookmark you put in your browser (called a "bookmarklet"), so when you see a web page you like you can save it with one click and without leaving the page.

The other part of it is the social and searching side. You can explore what other people are saving. By browsing other people's tags, you can search for links on specific topics, or you can look at what the most popular links are among all bookmarkers. If you find that you like someone's taste, you can subscribe to receive all of the links they mark in your account. Looking at the links other people are saving about a particular topic is like having a bunch of people reading and filtering information for you.

Del.icio.us specifically is also an open system. So if you decide you want to pick up your bookmarks and tags and go elsewhere with them, you can do that pretty easily provided that the site you want to bring them to lets you import.

In a discussion that Dave Taylor set up between web experts about Del.icio.us, Yahoo's Jeremy Zawodny summed it up this way:

But del.icio.us is compelling to me and others for the same reason the Flickr is. You can get a lot out of the system by simply using it for yourself. However, there's a lot more "social infrastructure" there if you want to tap into it. In del.icio.us you can see what other people think is popular, which tags, they use, etc.

There are lots of other things you can do with social bookmarking, but those are some of the general reasons it's worth looking at. My Del.icio.us account has become an important part of how I use the web. Travis has a list a mile long of all of the different social bookmarking tools there are out there. Maybe he'll post some of them in the comments for us.