I manage all my bookmarks through a central server (de.licio.us) where they can be referenced from any computer at any time - providing it has web access (of course).

Most of my bookmarks are publicly shared, so you can take a peek. Here are my high-level topics (e.g. labels). Click on any these items to see the the bookmarks.

The advantages of maintaining my bookmarks on-line are:

1. Central spot to access and maintain my bookmarks. No longer do I wish I had access to the bookmarks from my home PC, when I am off-site, working on my consulting laptop. Or say I am on my wife's computer, and discover a relevant work site - I can now simply bookmark it - centrally.
2. The organizational structure provided by delicious is quite good (see my description of labels - below).
3. One can glean additional insight from others with similar interest (i.e. social bookmarking).

I'm less interested in social-bookmarking, and more interested in a central (server-based) bookmark repository that I can access from the various computers that I work with. When it comes to social-bookmarking there are several options but the del.licio.us site is by far the most popular.

Labels - done right!

The de.licio.us team has done an outstanding job in their support of tags - sometimes refereed to as labels or keywords (in other systems).

I like to provide organization to my bookmarks, and with the browser's bookmarking tools - this meant hierarchies. If you spend the time to do this, it provides more structure - ultimately making a large set of topics more accessible.

That's all well and good, but a hierarchy gives you a very narrowly focused view of your data (i.e. one-dimensional), because you can only interrogate your data within the same narrowly focused view in which you cataloged the sites. As an example, I may have many repeated sub-categories of "articles" under several different, say technical and political. It gets worse the more "depth" you define within your hierarchy. For example, I may have several sub-categories (say Java, J2ME, and Ruby) under my technical category, before I get to the various articles. Using a hierarchy, I must first pick technical, then J2ME, then articles. What if I wanted peruse articles that dealt with BOTH J2ME and Ajax? In a traditional hierarchy - you can't.

Enter tags (e.g. labels or keywords) ...

del.icio.us gives you the ability to associate one or more tags to a bookmark - a kindof list of keywords (per se). I'm sure your aware that this is a popular concept (sometimes referred to as labels or keywords) that is promoted by many systems these days.

However del.icio.us has provided the ability to cross-cut the intersection of tags in any way that you desire. This truly makes the categorization of your information multi-dimensional, supporting many different hierarchies (in my old way of thinking).

In del.icio.us, when you select a tag, it presents you with the relevant bookmarks, but it ALSO has a "related tags" section. This is merely an accumulation of other tags that are referenced by the set of displayed bookmarks. HERE's THE KICKER - if you click the "plus sign" (+) next to the related tag, it performs a cross-cut intersection.

Taking my previous example, I can start out looking at all my cataloged "articles", and then drill down into the various topics. In other words, my old hierarchy has been turned upside down. VERY KOOL INDEED!!!

This feature is also available in the various delicious browser plug-ins.

I only hope that other companies (Apple, Google, etc.) pick up on this idea. It is truly a simple concept with very powerful ramifications.

OLD OLD OLD ... delete

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