Del.icio.us: Social Tagging Takes the Web by Storm

Being the social butterfly that I am, I must tell you about my latest favorite site. I have to admit, that I didn't latch-on to this site on my first visit a few months ago. But, for the last month, I have been seriously in-like with Del.icio.us.

As many of you know, with the success of Flickr, tagging has taken the web by storm. To the geek world, I am so behind the wave of people discovering del.icio.us, but for the rest of the world, this is actually a timely article showcasing a new and exciting way to work on the web.

Del.icio.us, known as a social tagging site, is a great way to manage your bookmarks remotely. If I am at work or borrowing a friend's computer, I can log onto http://Del.icio.us and access my bookmarks, thoughtfully arranged by tags. Tags make finding what you need faster. For instance, if I want to bookmark Associated Content's site, www.associatedcontent.com, I might tag it with descriptive words like writer, author, online, articles, content, freelance, or any other word that could be a possible category for Associated Content. Now, when I want to find out which sites I can go to sell some of my freelance articles, I could log into del.icio.us and search under freelance. Now I would have all the addresses I had previously bookmarked with the tag freelance, including Associated Content.

Upon closer examination of the Associated Content link, I would notice that a number of others had bookmarked the site, as well, which brings us to some even cooler aspects of del.icio.us.1-Tags are searchable across the entire user base.If I am looking under content, I will see a few linked sites listed. I can go to these sites to learn more about what I was originally researching. It's more of a smart search than a traditional search engine, because these tags are created by users, not necessarily by the site owners. In short, this site is categorized manually by the users of the site and can't be confused by meta tags or purchased optimization techiniques.