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A general overview of delicious, folksonomy, and Cocoalicious. Get up to snuff on social bookmarking.

Since the beginning of web browsers, surfers have generally held onto a general routing when bookmarking an interesting link. They tend to add it to a personal collection in their web browser. Sometimes they sort those out into specific categories. Apple itself offers several default categories when you first launch Safari (Apple, News, Kids, Mac, etc). If you are a more advanced user, you may use a global bookmark manager application like Alco Blom's URL Manager Pro. ### What's So Yummy? Joshua Schachter wants to change the way you think about bookmarks. Schachter created a wonderful web application called del.icio.us that allows web users from all over the world to share their bookmarks with others. Users post their links to the del.icio.us service with a description and keywords (a.k.a. tags) to describe the content. This has created a global bookmark database that a web user can access from anywhere without regard for OS or web browser. You may be asking yourself why you would even want to share your bookmarks with the rest of the world? Think of it like sharing a photo album on Flickr or .Mac but instead of sharing a photograph of your sister's cheer team, you are sharing a news article about her team winning nationals. It's all about the sharing of information. The only difference is instead of sharing pixels, you are sharing text data (and people might be a bit more interested in a new story instead of a picture of your little sister). del.icio.us also lets you see who else is linking to the same things you are. This allows you to watch trends, see what's popular, and maybe find out about new ideas. Information is also shared by tagging. Tags are single word descriptors that you assign to a link. If we were to tag this article, you could probably use any of the following: mac, osx, del.icio.us, software, folksonomy, articles. Tagging also allows you to group your bookmarks in a way similar to those folders hidden in your web browsers bookmark manager. Unlike your old web browser, you can subscribe to a specific tag using RSS with del.icio.us. By subscribing to the osx tag, you will be notified when anyone posts a link to the del.icio.us service using the osx tag. This gives you the opportunity to find new information on the Internet that you may not have known about otherwise. If I have peaked your interest, lets cover some more of the basics. ### Getting Started Delicious

Starting with del.icio.us is a relatively simple task. You sign up for an account at the del.icio.us website picking a username and password. Your username is your gateway to your bookmarks. You can access your bookmarks from the following address (replacing username with yours obviously). http://del.icio.us/username Next, you want to add the posting bookmarklet to your browser's bookmarks bar (Available Here). This is your gateway to adding new bookmarks. I recommend using the experimental posting interface. It has support for tag recommendations, which makes it much easier to decide what tags best describe your content. Finally, you just want to start surfing the web and posting links. When you find something that is interesting, click the 'post' link in your bookmarks bar. Feel free to try it with this article! Having your bookmarks online is all well and good, but subscribing to other people's collections is even more interesting. ### Subscriptions del.icio.us has a feature called the Inbox that is a central repository for all of your contacts' bookmarks. Like a buddy list in iChat, you can add your friends to your del.icio.us Inbox. The easiest way I can explain this is have you subscribe to our feeds. * My Links * Ryan's Links * Matt's Links When you visit each of these pages you will see a link towards the top titled *subscribe*. If you click on that, the user will be added to your Inbox. The more people you add to your inbox, the more new links you will receive. The great thing about Inbox is that you don't always have to visit the del.icio.us homepage to view the Inbox. At the bottom of the page is an RSS link. Add it to your RSS aggregator of choice and you will be notified each time one of your contacts adds a new bookmark. If you visit a tag's page, you will also see the RSS link at the bottom. Here are a few tags you may want to subscribe to as examples: * osx * apple * mac * cocoa * politics ### Tools One of the great things about del.icio.us is that it provides hooks developers can connect to with their software. Because of this, Buzz Andersen was able to create a wonderful application called Cocoalicious.

Cocoalicious is manager for your del.icio.us bookmarks. It retrieves the data from the servers and formats it in an iApp-like interface. On the left you have each of your tags listed. To the right of that is a listing of each link under a specific tag and an optional web browser to view the pages in. Cocoalicious also allows you to subscribe to bookmarks as well. You can use it via its *Post from Safari* feature or from your news aggregator. Both NetNewsWire and PulpFiction also support Cocoalicious as an external editor. What this means is that you can specify Cocoalicious as your default weblog editor. When you find a link of interest in the app, you can select *Post to Weblog* and it will send the link to Cocoalicious instead of a real blog editor like MarsEdit or ecto. Aside from being a standard manager for your delcious links, Cocoalicious can also become your own personal Google as Buzz has described it. Under the File menu is an option to *Index All Posts*. What this does is visit each of your del.icio.us links, grab all of the text on the page, and put it in a database that you can search. This is somewhat like Spotlight in that it is searching the full text of your links rather than just the title and tags. Very useful. ### Wrapping It Up The most exciting thing about del.icio.us is that it is still an early alpha product. Changes are made on a constant basis that both enhance current functionality and add new. Just recently, Joshua began testing a new bundles feature that lets you group tags into their own container. Though its not yet public, it is sure to be a very useful feature in the future. del.icio.us is a free service at this point. Joshua has taken funding that is allowing him to work on the project full time now, so whether it will remain that way remains to be seen. Either way, once you have begun to use it, it is hard to go back to simple browser bookmarks.

Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at

Reader Comments (10)

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1 defmech remarks: #1) On May 8, 2005 3:56 AM: Great article! Although I’d like to point out that the excellent NewsFire (http://www.newsfirerss.com/) supports Cocoalicious as well.

2 Tarsh Einfallsreich remarks: #2) On May 13, 2005 9:36 PM: I have to agree, delicious has made my life a hell of a lot easier. I use two machines an imac g5 and a pc at home, i just have the same bookmarks import to both machines, but not only that it makes my life a lot easier while I am at uni or even at af riends place. I don’t have to play the “what was that url” game anymore.

3 Fulaunloare remarks: #3) On January 23, 2008 5:34 AM: Hello!
Nice site ;)
Bye

4 Christmas Party Recipe remarks: #4) On January 26, 2008 2:33 PM

Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!

Thanks!
If you don’t wish to receive such messages, please send your domain name to jj([at])dedik_dot_biz to remove your site from our list.

5 College Picture Tongue remarks: #5) On February 1, 2008 6:09 AM

Big Thanks!