Some of you are very experienced in using a variety of web tools, while some are probably on a learning curve. For those who are on a learning curve relative to using bookmarking tools and making use of social apps, this article shares a couple of tips that may be of interest to you.
While I have been using the web for many years, I really did not know anything about bookmarking tools, like del.ic.ious, until about a year ago. I would really have benefited from knowing about it much, much sooner. It’s a tool I use almost everyday now, and I suspect you could get a lot of benefit from it, too.
Right now I have about 35 pages of bookmarks organized on my delicious page. A friend has 168 pages! In addition to having all this information stored in one place, it is organized by topics that are meaningful to me. The bookmarks are organized by tags ranging from 7 habits to web design and writing. Most of the bookmarks have more than one tag, because, in most cases, more than one tag makes sense. For example, I may tag an article from Stephen Covey’s blog with 7 habits and with productivity, and possibly with leadership (depending on the article).
Setting up an account at del.ic.ious is easy, and adding bookmarks to your account is easy as well. I use a Firefox extension that lets me add any article I am browsing to my del.ic.ious bookmarks. For example, in viewing a Matt Cutts article recently, I clicked the toolbar item added by this extension, and it took me to my del.ic.ious account and opened a window for me to label the article with tags and notes:
After adding tags, I saved it and now it is always available for me to find again later (either through my tags, or by using a search feature on delicious).
Hence, you can see that this is a superb way to accumulate and organize useful how-to information.
There is another feature that I whited out in the figure above: the ability to share the link with people in your “del.ic.ious network.” There are four people in my network, and sometimes I share a link with them (if I know they would be interested) and sometimes they share one with me. But, in respect of their privacy, I whited out their names in the above figure.
A lot of sites make it easy for you to bookmark their articles, whether you have a Firefox toolbar for it or not. For example, I typically provide one of the following bookmarking/sharing tools at the end of each article:
When you click on one of these, it gives you a quick way to bookmark the item on del.ic.ious (among other bookmarking sites) or to share it on social sites like Facebook and MySpace and StumbleUpon and Digg and so on. So, to illustrate, here is a snapshot of part of the screen you would see by clicking the “Bookmark” icon at the bottom of this article:
Hopefully this short introduction to bookmarking and sharing tools gives you enough of a how-to for you to try it out yourself. The best way to learn how to use these tools is, of course, to dive into using them.
I am comfortable now using del.ic.ious but am still a bit of a noob to sharing via Facebook and StumbleUpon and Digg. As I noted earlier, I wish I had started using these tools much sooner, especially del.ic.ious. There is a ton of information that I could have saved into a format that I could easily retrieve today.
For those of you who have been doing this longer than me, please feel free to chime with your tips and insights.