The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users
First things first, real quick like. At it’s core, del.icio.us is a place where you can store your bookmarks and get to them from anywhere you can find an internet connection. Accounts are free, get yours today.
Though there aren’t many reasons not to set up an account, the biggest reason recently went away: Yahoo! acquired del.icio.us, thereby assuring at least the medium-term longevity of the site. That said, many of the best parts of del.icio.us don’t require you to get an account. So if you doubt you’ll sign up, continue reading–there’s probably something here for you.
Habit One: Make many marks
Bookmark everything you find interesting. You can’t really overdo it, so there’s no reason not to do it. Bookmarking a lot makes it easy to find your stuff again, plus you’re adding to the network effect and helping others out. There are several bookmarklets available that make it much easier to collect stuff with del.icio.us. If you’re a Firefox user (and why wouldn’t you be?), check out the new Firefox bookmarklet that del.icio.us provides.
Habit Two: Sir Tag-A-Lot
Tag it. Tag it good. Be liberal in your use of tags, but clean it up once in a while. No need to have ‘blog’ and ‘blogs’ in there. Choose one and stick with it. The way you clean up your tags is to go to the ‘Settings’ section of your account (top right corner). You’ll see a box in the right corner of your screen with two sections: ’settings’ and ‘experimental.’ Under the ’settings’ section, click the ‘tags’ link. This will take you to a page where you can delete tags, or change one tag into another. So if you’ve got several dozen links tagged with ’sleeping’ and you want them all to be ’sleep’, this is where you can make that adjustment.
Habit Three: Use the inbox
The inbox is a mystery for many folks, but it’s a powerful tool. Your del.icio.us inbox allows you to track what’s been added to particular tags and to track what particular users have bookmarked. There are a couple of ways to begin using your inbox. You can click the ‘inbox’ link at the top of any page when you’re logged in and then click the ‘edit inbox’ link on the right side. Or you can just click the ’settings’ link (top right corner) and then click the ‘inbox labels’ link under the ‘experimental’ section. Either way will get you to the same page where you’ll see a couple of text entry boxes. One is for adding USERNAMES and the other is for adding tags. If you know the del.icio.us USERNAME of someone you want to track, enter it in the ‘user’ field and hit the subscribe button. If you have a particular tag you want to keep tabs on, enter it in the ‘tag’ field and hit subscribe. Once you get the hang of this, you’ll fill up your inbox in no time. Here are a couple to get you started…for tags, try ‘productivity‘, ‘business‘ and ‘gtd‘. For users try ‘bren‘ (that’s me!) or ‘steverubel‘ (he’s prolific!)
Habit Four: Mix ‘n match
Now that you know how to use the inbox, don’t feel constrained to individual tags. Mix ‘em up. If you’re inclined to track the ‘blackberry’ tag, but you only want links that have to do with productivity and not ‘How to set up a blackberry server’, just enter the following into your inbox tag field: blackberry+productivity. That’ll show you links that have both tags. You can also discover various types of media and/or file types just by manipulating the url. For instance, if you want to find punk rock mp3 files, try http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3+punk. If you want to find all kinds of punk video media, try http://del.icio.us/tag/system:media:video+punk. With the ’system:filetype:’ you can get all sorts of file types (read: file extension, like mp3, doc, pdf, etc…), not just those associated with audio and video. With the ’system:media:’ the supported media types are ‘video’, ‘audio’, ‘document’ and ‘image’. Mess around with the urls and see what you get.
Habit Five: Stalk other users
After tracking a few things for a while, you’ll start to wonder where a particular user gets all their interesting bookmarks. Maybe they’re connected, or maybe they’re just copying someone else who is connected. Either way, you can check out other users’ inboxes by just replacing their USERNAME in this url:http://del.icio.us/inbox/. By exploring through a few layers of who is watching who, you’ll start to come up with your own list of people to stalk–just add them to your inbox!USERNAME
Habit Six: Get it to go
Now that you’ve got a full inbox, you probably don’t want to go troll through it every day, trying to figure out what you’ve already seen. No worries, just scroll to the bottom of the inbox page and look for the orange RSS button. You can subscribe to pretty much any del.icio.us page through your feed reader. Regardless of the page, the naming of the RSS feed is pretty consistent. Here’s how it goes:
- Tags: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/
TAGNAME - Combined tags: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/
TAGNAME+TAGNAME - Popular: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular
- Popular tags: http://del.icio.us/rss/popular/
TAGNAME - Users: http://del.icio.us/rss/
USERNAME - Someone’s inbox: http://del.icio.us/rss/inbox/
USERNAME(hint: use YOUR inbox) - Media: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:media:MTYPE+
TAGNAME - Filetype: http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/system:filetype:FTYPE+
TAGNAME
Habit Seven: Move it around
No need for your bookmarks to remain trapped in del.icio.us. If you have a blog, you can export your links a number of ways. You can have a list of each day’s bookmarks auto-posted to your blog by going into the settings section and clicking on the ‘daily blog posting’ link in the experimental section. There isn’t much documentation on this, but if you’re using Typepad look here, if you’re using MovableType look here (note the Blogger instructions in the comments), and Wordpress folks look here. Others should consult Google.
If all that looks too intimidating, you can output a linkroll by using this utility (this is how I populate the ‘Hot Links’ section of this site).
Another way to move it around is to use the “for” tag. This allows you to tag items for other users. To do this, just use the tag ‘for:USERNAME‘. Anytime something is tagged this way, the user can click on the ‘for’ link at the top of the page when they’re logged in to find everything that’s been sent to them. At the bottom of the page is a private RSS feed that can be used in a feed reader.
Habit Eight: Explore more
Now that Yahoo! owns del.icio.us, we can be pretty confident that more features will be rolling down the line, not to mention a little better documentation. Be sure to check out the help section–it’s got good links to various parts of the del.icio.us system. Try digging around the ‘options’ section, which is at the bottom of your list of tags. The tag cloud is kinda cool to look at. Also, check out bundling, which allows you to group certain tags in a “bundle.” Bundles are displayed at the top of your list of tags. You can find the bundle option in settings. Finally, keep an eye on the official del.icio.us blog for more feature announcements.
Don’t neglect third party options either. This blog has a great list of tools and it’s constantly updated.
That oughta keep you busy for a few minutes…
Very helpful, thanks!
Nowadays, it’s easy to jeopardize ALL your time while browsing with all the new 2.0 services. I love getting all that info, though, and this is an extremely insightful tutorial for del.icio.us use.
If nothing else, being a “connected” user will help you to drive traffic back to your own site.
Thanks for the info. I don’t know why, but I haven’t really used my inbox much. One thing that I would also add is to tag specific delicious queries. For instance, under the mp3 tag you could have a link to http://del.icio.us/tag/system:filetype:mp3. Or you could tag specific users whose links you are “stalking” to make it easier to pull up their del.icio.us linkage.
brilliant. absolutely brilliant. now filling my inbox with insanely relevant subs for users, tags for work, tags for play, tags for fun…amazing. where do we submit our feature requests? yahoo? del.icio.us blog? we need a better way of establishing a controlled vocabulary and I have some ideas. keep up the great work. web2.0 evolves quickly. damn this is cool.
This is a great post. Really short, easy to follow, but packed with info.
Thanks!
-N
since i started tracking people with RSS, its taken me to another level. This service rocks!
Hey, really impressive list :) I’m just inspired to use my neglected del.icio.us inbox now :)
You might like to add the “Arrange tags” feature to this list. It allows you to organize your tags in a manner similar to folders, and prevents you from being lost in a maze of tags :)
If you’re a Firefox user (and why wouldn’t you be?)
Because, quite frankly, FireFox is butt ugly.
[Tried to Trackback but Typepad does not allow Haloscan Trackbacks] See URL. Excerpt: “The Slacker Manager has a great article, titled The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users, explaining how to best exploit tagging. I have added this article in my short Must Read link section.”
Great tips!
Thanks for a clean short overview. I would of loved reading this some time agoo…
This is a great list and very useful! Given your expertise, I was wondering if you know about http://www.blinklist.com and if you do, why you have decided to stick with del.icio.us vs. BlinkList. We are working hard at making our service better and better and I would love to hear your thoughts. If you want to know what makes us different from del.icio.us you can check out this page.
http://www.blinklist.com/about/category/general/blinklist-vs-delicious/
Mike
Good post.
Do you know of any tools to automatically add posts (and tags) from WordPress to Del.icio.us?
@Mike: I’ve heard/seen Blinklist, but haven’t spent any time with it. I stick with del.icio.us mainly out of entropy and the fact that folks I know/respect continue to use it. I’ll dig into Blinklist a bit now though…
@Paul: I haven’t seen anything like that…that sounds kinda scary. Although I’ve added my own posts to del.icio.us a time or two, it’s generally bad form. The idea of a tool that autmatically populates del.icio.us from a blog sounds like the practical end of del.icio.us, when you consider the damage spam blogs could do with a tool like that.
Excellent article. I’ve never used del.icio.ous before, but I’m heading that way now to give it a try!
-Santoro
monopolion
Excellent tips. I’m still a del.icio.us novice but these steps will defintitely allow me to jump a couple of rungs on the expertise ladder. Thanks!
I’m actually shocked that I’m doing ALL of these things, bar the third (I’m down with the 2.0 crew, huh?) Since I joined up with delicious, I’ve been following individual tags via their RSS feeds. But now I look at it, the actual inbox on delicious has it’s own RSS feed. So perhaps I’ve been doing that a little assbackwards. Great post!
Excellent article, it will be interesting to see if and what changes occur to the site now that Yahoo officially owns Del.icio.us.
Thanks!
Explicative and clear, I was looking for something like this. But I still have dificulty adding multiple taggs to my inbox.
Do you use any other social bookmarking service? If yes which one?(Because I’m still searching:http://quimble.com/poll/view_poll/224)
(found via http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/B0A8D363-E637-4602-A2A3-715C1CF0642A/)
Great post.
I’m surprised at how low Bundling is and at the lack of users who take advantage of it.
I dont know how I’d survive without bundles, and am horrified when i see people with hundreds of tags which arent categorized.
Please Bundle!!
Don’t forget about Firefox’s live bookmarks. You can use them to view a del.icio.us rss feed instead of using a newsfeed reader. That way, the links are right where they belong…in your browser’s bookmarks.
Here’s a howto
Nice point on the sharing tags for community practice where we need to share dieas across multiple people
Great tips. I hadn’t used the Inbox feature. Del.icio.us is more delicious than ever for me now. Thanks.
To Bren: Glad to hear that you want to take a look at http://www.blinklist.com. If you do, I would love to hear your thoughts on our service. You are obviously an expert user so whether you stick with del.icio.us or move over to BlinkList, your feedback would be greatly appreciated. Mike
Great article, found using…. you guessed it… del.icio.us!
Another thing that can be usefull is firefox extentions that will sync your del.icio.us book marks into your bookmarks on firefox. I have added this to all my computers so that if I Tag something at work, it will head home for me, and if I tag at home it will head to work for me. Also if I am not near one of my computers, I can just tag it where ever (after loging into del.icio.us) and it will head to both my home and work computers. I find running thought the bookmark menues easer for me, so it is nice to have the book marks on the local computer, but synced from the on-line source nice.
Have you come across any way to tag a blog entry with a del.icio.us tag upon publication?
Thanks…
Does anyone know how to see your privately marked links once you’ve made them? I can’t find this anywhere. TIA
Some of you might be interested in a new application for mobile phones called DeliciousMona. It explores a new way to extend the usage of del.icio.us using it as a bridge between mobile and online bookmarking. You can learn more at http://deliciousmona.com/learn.php
del.icio.us rocks my world. I knew half of you tips already but thanks for the rest. They rock.
Between del.icio.us, furl, and Yahoo! MyWeb (I hope Yahoo take the best of both it’s similar services and merges them soon) I spend half of my day just adding bookmarks. ;-)
Yept, yet the question seem for me gonna to be how I could find the tag that extra match what I am searching for ? which key word should I use ? “web2.0″ or “web_20″ ? It confusing me so much.
More than six months since this was written, it still remains an authoritative how-to power guide to del.icio.us. Thanks!
Can anyone suggest a program to upload bookmarks to del.icio.us?
I used to use delicoso, but it has stopped working…
PLEASE someone help!!!
Excellent job, guyz, very helpful