How to Use Delicious: The King of Social Bookmarking

Delicious is the world's largest social bookmarking site.  With it you can save, manage and share pages in a centralized source.

It also brings a very powerful community aspect to social bookmarking. This article will reveal innovate ways to use Delicious.

8 Innovative Uses for Delicious

So why should you use social bookmarking instead of just your browser? Two important reasons include that your bookmarks can be shared with others using a specific URL or RSS feed, and they can be accessed from any computer with an Internet connection.

Delicious show popularly bookmarked pages on it's home page.

But there are lot more reasons to consider using Delicious. Here are eight more:

#1: Organizing Your Resources

Probably the most obvious reason to use Delicious is to organize the content you come across on a daily basis for future use. It's hard to read every great blog post that's shared with you through other social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Why not bookmark them for later, so whenever you're looking for information on a particular topic, you have a great compilation of favorite articles and pages to choose from?

#2: Action Plans

Another thing I find when I'm browsing the web or reading a great how-to post—I want to actually use that information, but not necessarily at the time I find it. So instead of possibly forgetting about what a great idea it is, I create action tags instead.

For example, you can use tags such as actionbusinesscard to save a page on a great business card design service that you want to use to redesign your business cards, actionlinkedin for posts on LinkedIn tips and marketing, or actionfacebookpage to save a great post on how to create fan-only Facebook content.

#3: Company Sharing

Because my company does content marketing, we share a lot of links to great content development ideas back and forth by email. Instead of having to dig through a bunch of emails to find something in particular, we set up a company-wide Delicious account and now we bookmark items there. This way, whenever we want to see the latest finds in infographics or graphic design resources, we can refer to our Delicious bookmarks. This can be used to get employees active in not only learning new things, but also sharing what they learn with their colleagues in any industry.

#4: Backlink Recording

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There are tons of ways for link-builders to keep track of the links they build for their websites, from Excel spreadsheets to paid software. But what if you want to do it faster? With Delicious, you can simply bookmark a page you requested a link from and tag it by topic, quality or type for future reference. So if you're making a comment on a .edu blog about pets, your tags would be edu pets blogcomment, and the next time you need to look for one of those three elements for another link, they would be right in your Delicious bookmarks.

#5: Social Networking Profiles

Do you create profiles on sites only to forget about them later? Bookmarking them in Delicious not only gives the profile a little link juice, but will keep the profile links handy in case you want to share them or at least remember what networks you're on. You can tag them with socialprofile updatemonthly so you know that it's a network you want to update on a certain schedule.

#6: Social Mentions

A great idea by Ari Herzog is to use Delicious as a way to keep track of mentions about you in articles, or as he likes to call it, sharing his ego. Keeping track of these kinds of mentions could come in handy for testimonials or references in your own writing or websites.

#7: Writing Showcase

Combining Ari's ego idea and a great template, you can use Delicious RSS feeds to create a customized portfolio.

I made some WordPress customizations to a theme that gives you the option to import your Delicious bookmarks, and I use it as my own portfolio, separating guest posts from article directory entries by using the feeds for my bookmarks tagged with guestpost and articles.

#8: Don't Lose Your Bookmarks!

Last, but not least, if you're paranoid like I am, you'll want to know that your bookmarks won't be lost if something happens to Delicious itself. Delicious offers the option to export your bookmarks and download them as an HTML file. Just set a reminder to do this periodically to save your bookmarks just in case something should happen, à la Magnolia.

Now, let's look at how to use Delicious and why you should use this particular network for your bookmarking needs.

Signing Up

If you don't already have an account with Delicious (you can use the old-school login page here for accounts created before Yahoo took over), you'll need a Yahoo account to sign up. Click on join now on Delicious and login to your Yahoo account.

Delicious Username

You'll be given an option to create a Delicious username similar to your Yahoo ID or create a custom Delicious username. Consider as you create your custom Delicious username that it will also be the URL for your account (delicious.com/username).

Importing Bookmarks

After choosing your username, you're given the option to import your bookmarks from your browser. You can choose to have your browser bookmarks imported as private or public.

Delicious Tools

Delicious offers a variety of tools to help you conveniently save bookmarks and review bookmarked pages.

Firefox Add-On

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Probably the most useful tool for Delicious is the Firefox Add-On. Once installed, you'll be able to:

#1: Access your bookmarks via a drop-down menu from Firefox.

You can view your bookmarks based on Recently Bookmarked, Most Visited and Tags. You can also use the More About This Page option to see if a page is already bookmarked on Delicious, how many times it has been bookmarked and which members have saved it publicly.

#2: Keep your bookmarks open on the left side of your browser.

You can sort your tags alphabetically or by most used, and your bookmarks alphabetically, by site, by date added, by most visited or by last visited.

#3: Keep your bookmarks in a toolbar.

If you're not a fan of using the menu bar option or shrinking your browser space with the sidebar, you can simply have a toolbar that displays your bookmarks by the latest added or by favorite tags. I personally like the Favorite Tags because you can customize it for your most visited topics.

#4: Use Ctrl-D or the option in your right-click menu to save a bookmark on Delicious.

Want to save a bookmark quickly to Delicious? Simply hit Ctrl-D to toggle the window to save your bookmark.

Bookmarklets

If you're not a fan of add-ons or if you use another browser, Delicious also offers some helpful bookmarklets to drag onto your browser's bookmark toolbar.

• Bookmark on Delicious—This bookmarklet will allow you to bookmark the page.
• My Delicious—This bookmarklet will take you to your bookmarks on Delicious.
• Bookmark History—Want to know how many times a page has been saved and by whom? Use this bookmarklet to go to the Delicious bookmark for any page that you're on.

Connecting With Others

Whenever you're on another user's profile, you can add him or her to your network using the options on the top right of the profile.

Unfortunately, the only way that other users will know is if you tell them, or if they notice you're following them in their network listing.

Saving a Bookmark

Whenever you save a bookmark to Delicious, you have several options to fill in about the bookmark. Delicious will automatically pull in the URL and the title (based on the title tag of the page or post you're saving). You can edit these as needed.

Notes

Notes are your additional description/information about your bookmark.

Tags

Be sure to use descriptive tags for your bookmarks, as they will be key to finding relevant information again. Tags are space-separated, and if you're using multiple words, they should be run together, such as socialmedia.

You can start typing in a tag, and it will bring up a drop-down, or you can select it from the complete list of tags below.

Send

You can share your latest bookmarks with your fans if you think they might like them. Start typing in the name to get a drop-down or use the Send tab to select the fans you want to share with.

You can also add a personal message (up to 116 characters) to your fans about the bookmark.

When you save your bookmark, it will be sent to the other user and arrive in his or her inbox.

Privacy

Want to keep that bookmark to yourself? Simply check the Mark as Private box. Otherwise your bookmarks are visible to anyone who happens to come across your profile.

Subscriptions

If you're interested in particular topics, you can subscribe to those tags by going to your subscriptions area and Add a Subscription.

You can follow a particular tag and even specify bookmarks with that tag from a specific member.

RSS

If you prefer to have your subscriptions in your RSS reader, Delicious offers RSS feeds at the bottom of each page, so you can subscribe to particular topics (explore tags or view most popular tags) and users:

• Bookmarks with a particular tag—http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/tag/tag?count=15
• Other users' bookmarks—http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/username?count=15
• Other users' bookmarks with specific tags—http://feeds.delicious.com/v2/rss/username/tag?count=15

Your Thoughts on Bookmarking With Delicious

Do you use Delicious social bookmarking or do you have another service you prefer? What other innovative uses for Delicious can you think of for saving and sharing bookmarks? Leave your comments in the box below.

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