McFilter

Much Linking

Only about a year after all the super-cool-early-adopter geeks signed up, I've finally jumped on the del.icio.us bandwagon.

For those of you who don't know, del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks system". Bookmarks because it's a way of storing your bookmarks or favourites on the web; so you can get at them from any computer anywhere and you can provide a short description so you've some chance of remembering why you bookmarked it. And social because you can see other people's bookmarks.

That last part doesn't sound very interesting, until I tell you about tags. When you create a bookmark you can specify some tags for that bookmark, a bit like keywords or categories. Then you can search for all of your bookmarks with a given tag, or all of everyone's bookmarks with a given tag - for example, http://del.icio.us/tag/liverpool+football gives you all the bookmarks tagged with liverpool and football.

The upshot of all this, for those of you who haven't rushed off and signed up yourself, is that I've set-up del.icio.us to post any new bookmarks to McFilter. So, in an hour or so (if I've set it up right, otherwise real soon now honest...) there should be a new entry containing my bookmarks. Then each day, if I've saved any new bookmarks, there'll be an entry with the new ones in. There may be some changes to the formatting too, depending on what the entries look like.

If you're still reading, and if the idea has piqued your interest, here's a good, user-friendly introduction. Then you might want to look at nutr.itio.us which makes choosing tags a bit easier when you add bookmarks, and the delicious Firefox extension which gives you some handy new items on your right-click menu if you use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer (and you should). Finally, instructions on getting del.icio.us to post bookmarks to your blog (I'm currently working on how to set this up for blogger/blogspot blogs, so I'll post details when I work it out).