del.icio.us

del.icio.us, aside from being probably the cleverest domain name ever, has helped to popularize one of the most useful and interesting web tools around: tagging.

At its most basic, del.icio.us is a site that allows you to store and share your bookmarks (or favourites, for those who haven't read our firefox post) online. Big deal, you say. Well, you're right -- that part's not terribly exciting.

The fun part is that del.icio.us allows you to choose a number of tags to help you create a filing system for your bookmarks. So if you're doing some research online and you finally find that cool website that's all about, say, a jazz band with a sheepdog drummer, you could bookmark that site to your del.icio.us account, and file it under 'music', 'sheepdogs', 'jazz', and 'what-the?'. Then whenever you want to pull up all your bookmarks for sites about music or sheepdogs or jazz, that great site about the sheepdog drummer will be there in the list.

Okay, and the REALLY FUN fun part? How about this: your 'music' and 'sheepdogs' bookmarks automatically get added to a central stream of bookmarks about music and sheepdogs that everyone has added. So by browsing the main del.icio.us music tag, you can see bookmarks for all the sites that all del.icio.us users have tagged as music sites. Or by browsing the combined music+sheepdogs tags, you can find... wait, can you guess?

What emerges is a unique kind of peer-reviewed remix of the entire internet. Real people get to share what they find interesting or useful, without doing any extra work at all. It's simple. It's actually too simple to explain. It's so simple that you really have to try it to understand it. It's so simple, in fact, that it's helped del.icio.us to completely reframe the way we're using the internet.

Oh ya! There's also a programmable API, and RSS feeds for every single tag PLUS any combination of tags. Holy sheepdog!

We have a whole resource center dedicated to the strategic use of tagging for nonprofits -- check it out! There's also a great resource page on the netsquared main site. Ha.p.py ta.ggi.ng!