del.icio.us

So I've been using del.icio.us for a few months now, and I have to say, I quite like it. For those of you who don't know what del.icio.us is, it's a site used mainly to store your bookmarks. However, it does things in a different way.

When you find a site you want to bookmark, you can simply right-click or click on the plug-in to update your bookmarks. What you will see is similar to the image above. The neat thing about this system is that you can tag (or label) your bookmarks any way you want, and you can use as many tags as you want to represent the bookmark. You can also share your bookmarks, although I don't choose to.

To find a bookmark, you can either do a search, or you can reference a tag cloud. The words in the tag cloud tend to be bigger or smaller depending on how often you use the tag.

Things I like about del.icio.us:

• You reference your bookmarks anywhere there is an Internet connection. I don't have to back up or copy over my browser bookmarks should I go through the pain of rebuilding my machine (or even better, should my computer crash)
  
• You're able to tag and group your bookmarks anyway you want, and not in a hierarchical fashion. This is great as this is how we tend to sort and organize things in our brain.
  
• You can add new bookmarks even if you're not at your usual computer
• You can filter down the bookmark list using the tags on the tag cloud.
  

Functionality I wished del.icio.us had:

• Believe it or not, I would love to be able to sort the bookmarks alphabetically. You can't, only with the tags can you sort alphabetically.
• When I'm tagging a page, I wish there was the ability to "guess" what tag I'm typing in, as in guess using an existing tag in my tag cloud. I don't want to tag things with similar words (eg "blog" vs. "blogs"). The two words are the same thing in my mind, and it's very annoying to have to go back and fix it.
• I would love the ability to automatically find 404 links and delete them.
  
• I would love the ability to exclude certain tags when doing a search.
  

Right now, I have about 1000 bookmarks, and the list has surprisingly shrank since I first exported my bookmarks over. As I'm super anal, I'm going through each and every bookmark to fix the tags and make them more meaningful to me, as well as fix my list of bookmarks.

Despite the negative points, I still like this tool, and rarely use my browser bookmarks any longer. Give it a try.