Getting The Most Value from Your Delicious Bookmarks

I know that several of you, like me, use the Delicious bookmarking service, and so I am sharing some thoughts with you on how to get more value out of that service. It is my hope that the power users among you will chime in with additional tips.

For those who do not use the Delicious bookmarking service, I encourage you to give it a try, and to check out my Delicious how-to article.

Now to my four specific recommendations:

Expand Your Delicious Network

The networking capabilities within Delicious let you see what your friends, or others of interest to you, are bookmarking. So, for example, if you want to see my bookmarks as a part of your network, just click on http://delicious.com/brucekeener and add me to your network. Then, anytime you are checking yours, you can check mine, and you may see one that you want to add to your bookmarks.

I actually need to expand my own network. Thomas has been on mine for a while, and Paul Stamatiou, and I just recently added Digital Nomads to the list. (See their article inviting their readers to join the Digital Nomads Delicious Network.)

If you are open to having me and others join your Delicious Network, please provide an address for that in the comments. I think that would be a great way for us to learn from each other.

Periodically Review Bookmarked Articles

The downside to a service such as Delicious is that it is so easy to bookmark good articles and then just forget about them. A few months ago I realized I was doing just this, and decided to periodically review at least some of the bookmarks. So, I added a task to my “Someday” list entitled “Review GTD Reference Material,” and part of my performing that task includes reviewing the articles I have tagged as GTD (or lifehacks) on Delicious.

I also use these occasional reviews to clean up the bookmarks. For example, in going through the GTD-related ones, I may find a few that are just not that useful to me anymore. So I delete them.

Use Search Services to Find the Right Bookmark

Once you start accumulating a lot of bookmarks, it can be hard to find “that one right article” when you are looking for something specific. This is where the built-in search of Delicious can come in handy. Also, as noted in this Lifehacker article, there are some other search services you can turn to.

This is one area that could probably use some further work to improve search results, but the existing results can be useful. Note that when you do a search within Delicious, you can set the search so that it goes into only your bookmarks, your network’s bookmarks, or everybody’s bookmarks.

If You Like It, Bookmark It

When I was testing out the search services that Lifehacker mentioned, I did not find the article I was looking for. I used the search term “brain free will” to look for an article on brain research that claimed to show that free will might be an illusion. Turns out that I did not bookmark that article after all, although I sure wish I had.

What I suspect happened is that I liked the article so well that I submitted it to StumbleUpon, or possibly Digg, to spread it around. Sometimes when I do that with an article, I forget to bookmark it on Delicious.

So, I am going to try to watch this in the future, and thought you might also benefit from this heads-up.

Wrap-up

Hopefully you will find these tips to be helpful, and I do hope the power users among you will chime in with additional tips. I certainly do not claim to be an expert on Delicious, but I do know that it is a valuable service, and it’s a freebie, too!

Tagged as: How To, internet, technology