a1-fan-fun

If del.icio.us is not the best social media site ever, it’s certainly very close to it. Oddly enough, it is ignored by most meta-bloggers. I suppose it’s due to the apparent difficulty to make it onto the site’s main page. Well, those short-sighted bloggers don’t know what they are missing.

Think about a subject, preferably using only one word to define it; if that’s not possible, write the needed words together or join them with hyphens. This will generate a tag. Now type the following on your browser: http://del.icio.us/tag/yourchosentag . Chances are you will find dozens of links that you wouldn’t see on any search engine’s first result pages. Would you like to have new links on your chosen subject(s) delivered to you regularly, as they are added to del.icio.us? Just scroll down the page and subscribe to its feed. Or add the following to your feed reader: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/yourchosentag .

By taking these simple steps, you will keep yourself up-to-date on a plethora of topics, find brand new/forgotten/obscure sites, detect new and ongoing trends, get inspiration for more articles and so on. Wouldn’t your site or blog benefit from it?

If you’re into link listing, del.icio.us will help you get things going. Bookmark the links you want to include on your next list and make sure to add to each of them a special tag to help you distinguish them from the unrelated ones. You could use, for instance, “list23,” “linklist4,” “my-next-post” etc. When you are ready to compile your list, you’ll quickly find in a single place all the links you need by just clicking on the pre-defined tag.

For those who just can’t stand spammers anymore, here’s yet one more reason to favour del.icio.us over other social media sites: the site’s users can’t send you any messages. They can, at the very best, send you links by using a “for:username” tag. But rest assured that most users don’t care at all for this feature. You’d hardly get bombarded by undesired links.

Note: I haven’t been paid to write this enthusiastic review. Unfortunately.

This is my entry for Aaron Stroud’s group writing project on del.icio.us.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 1:08 am and is filed under A Visitor's Perspective. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.