Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) is a social bookmarking Web service for storing, tagging, and sharing bookmarks. If you are a blogger or an information hound you have probably heard of this site and are most likely using it. For those of you who have not heard of this site, or you have heard of it and don’t understand why it’s so popular, keep reading.

There are several benefits to using Delicious. If you use computers in multiple locations, say one at home and one at work, Delicious can store all your bookmarks in one place. Delicious users can conveniently access their entire bookmark collection through any Web browser on any computer. New users can import and tag their existing browser bookmarks, and at any time you have the option to export your stored bookmarks for safe-keeping, or to transfer them back into a browser.

Another key benefit of using Delicious is that all the bookmarks are taggable, meaning users can add keywords of their choice instead of choosing one folder in which to store a bookmark. These tags are then searchable within your own personal list, as well as the entire Delicious community. For example, say I wanted to look up bookmarks that were tagged with the word “airfare.” Not only can I search my own list of bookmarks with that tag, I can also search all user bookmarks that have used a similar tag.

So you may be saying, “why not just search those keywords in Google?” The key difference here, which has helped lead to its success, is that Delicious’ content and search results are based on user-generated URLs and tags and are not based on Google optimized sites. The happy side-effect of this collection of links is that it has become a valuable resource to see what is popular and trendy based on how people value information. For example, if 1,000 people save and tag the same bookmark, that’s a good sign that they find value in it.

So whether you want to tag and store your bookmarks, add value to a blog, or you prefer to casually search through the most recent or popular links, Delicious offers value for users on several levels. The interface is elegantly simple, it’s quick and easy to sign up and get started, and oh yeah did I mention, it’s free?

Check out the most recent Bates Creative Group Delicious bookmarks here.

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