Better Bookmarking with Delicious

Have you ever been on vacation and wanted to access a website you’ve bookmarked on your home computer? Are you working on a project and want to share some useful websites with a colleague? Or have you hunted through your bookmark folders searching for a site? (Where did I save the energy efficient prototype home designed by Martha Stewart: energy efficient homes, green homes, or Martha Stewart home?)

You can solve these problems by using Delicious, a social bookmarking site. You bookmark sites like you do using your browser. But instead of storing bookmarks on your computer, they’re stored on a web-based server, so you can retrieve them on any device—computer, iPad or smart phone. Instead of filing bookmarks in folders, you tag them with keywords. For example, you could tag the energy efficient Martha Stewart home as energy efficient homes, green homes, and Martha Stewart home.

How Does Delicious Work?

Once you’ve set up your free account, it’s easy to save bookmarks on Delicious. Setup installs a Bookmark on Delicious button on your browser toolbar. Click on that button to bookmark a website. That brings up a screen with fields for entering keywords. You can also include a brief description or notes. Setup also installs a button on your browser toolbar that links to your Delicious bookmarks. Click on that button to view your bookmarks.

If you are accessing Delicious on a different computer or mobile device, sign on at Delicious.com and copy the URL of the site you want to bookmark into the designated field. Your links will load automatically once you’ve signed on.

What Makes Delicious Social?

Delicious is known as a social bookmarking tool because you can share your bookmarks with friends and colleagues. You can also make your bookmarks private, so that only you can access them. Or you can make your bookmarks public so all Delicious users can view them.

Why would you want to make your bookmarks public?  Say you’ve spent a lot of time finding romantic inns in Italy. By making these bookmarks public, other people looking for romantic inns would be able to access your carefully culled list.

Or maybe you’re looking for vegan restaurants in New York. You could do a Google search, and then sort through the 30 million results. Or you could search Delicious and get 55 recommendations chosen by people, not computers. Each listing includes information on how many people have saved the link, indicating which restaurant people find most Delicious.