this question is del.icio.us

November 3, 2005 9:12 AM

I'm looking for interesting uses of del.icio.us, how do you use it? what are some cool hacks? how do you organize your links? interesting tags? other uses?
posted by mhaw to Computers & Internet (14 answers total)

Google replacement is the obvious one. Search likely tags there before hitting the search engines.

Livemarks is mesmerising.

I think there's a lot of space for integrating del.icio.us into other web apps. Cross-site tagging. Haven't seen anyone do it yet, though.
posted by Leon at 9:20 AM on November 3, 2005

Lifehacker just had a post on setting up an rss feed through itunes to find mp3s. I tried the mash-up version and it worked surprisingly well.
posted by BigBrownBear at 9:21 AM on November 3, 2005

IMO, delicious is much more useful for putting together a collection of things you find interesting, funny, or useful for reference than it is for more personal bookmarks you use every day like banking, weather, to do's, etc. Things I've learned from using delicious:
1) Keep a toread tag for things that I'm interested in but don't have time to sort through at the moment.
2) Reading the popular tag is the best way to keep up with the cutting edge.
3) Subscribe via RSS to tags you find yourself checking often.
4) Blummy is a nice little bookmarklet that makes posting to delicious really fast and simple.
posted by aebaxter at 9:27 AM on November 3, 2005

I know some people use it to track movies they want to watch (using the IMDb).
posted by BigBrownBear at 9:58 AM on November 3, 2005

Here's an attempt at a canonical list of del.icio.us hacks, extensions, tricks, and so on.
posted by sennoma at 10:09 AM on November 3, 2005

I use del.icio.us in lesson plans (usually for a unit, rather than a single-lesson) for one of my education classes. It is a nice way to direct students to groups of pre-selected links that serve as a starting point for finding similar sites.
posted by vkxmai at 10:12 AM on November 3, 2005

One neat trick is that you can get an RSS feed for any tag search... so if you hunt up, say, this page, get the RSS link at the bottom, and put it in iTunes as a podcast and have it automatically download all "funny" .mov files.
posted by Capn at 10:21 AM on November 3, 2005

I search delicious instead of, say, DMOZ or other human-compiled hierarchical directories.

I post to delicious mostly things that I either want to be able to revisit or share with friends--I use a little PHP script on my blog to republish my own delicious posts there.

I use Cocoalicious instead of browser bookmarks, for the most part (I'm on a Mac).

I have several keyword feeds from delicious in my feedreader (and several keyword feeds from flickr, for that matter). This is more for my amusement than edification, but what the hell.
posted by adamrice at 10:42 AM on November 3, 2005

I use it to track things I want to buy(of which there are many). Books, comics, movies, clothes. That way, if I want to find something on Amazon to bring my order up to $25, I have a list of things I actually want rather than something random(amazon+thingsiwant). If I'm going to the comic book shop, I have a list of things to look for(comics+thingsiwant). Etc.
posted by Juliet Banana at 12:31 PM on November 3, 2005

I use it to track the random comments I leave on blogs all over the place. Not that I couldn't do it with regular bookmarks, but with del.icio.us it's a lot easier to ignore the old ones.
posted by smackfu at 12:43 PM on November 3, 2005

For a while I used an RSS feed of one category of my del.icio.us links to generate frequently updated links on a website, but then I got bored with it and took it down. It worked great through.
posted by easternblot at 1:13 PM on November 3, 2005

Of course you always have your individual del.icio.us inbox (complete with RSS Feed of course!) where u can make a list of tags you are interested in and the site keeps a list for you of any and every new item tagged with any of them. I find myself spending ages poring over this each day.
posted by mr_benn at 2:14 PM on November 3, 2005

You can post any Mefi entry you make and want to track.

You can find out how influential you are as a del.icio.us user here (and see what those who top the list are up to).
posted by rongorongo at 3:39 PM on November 3, 2005

Using a combination of Daily Mashup, a brilliant posting bookmarklet, and a tag "search engine", del.icio.us is now the most important web service I have ever used.

A useful hack can be to have meta tags, which explain other tags, such as acronyms. E.g., after tagging a site "ajax" for the first time, I'd also tag the corresponding Wikipedia entry using "meta:ajax".

Generally, some kind of very accurate information, such as ISBN or the author's full name, can be useful for finding related links later.

I also find that lots of tags is always better than a few.
posted by trez at 7:28 AM on November 4, 2005