Who’s that with the catchy URL that’s getting all the clicks?

Why, it’s del.icio.us! No matter where you are on the “is-web-20.html Web 2.0” lash or backlash, the pervasive influence of this little bookmark aggregator can’t be denied. On the surface, it doesn’t do much more than the PHP tool I wrote back in 1999 to collect my bookmarks in a centralized location. So, you may ask (as I have asked myself repeatedly) why should I care, apart from the appe.al of spe.lli.ng ever.yth.ing like th.is? Well, the devil is in the details.

A few crucial features bear the responsibility for del.icio.us’s success. Most basically, it is a “social bookmarking” site – not social in the sense that you get to know whether your fellow users are Beck fans (although you might), but rather in that everybody’s bookmarks are in one big pool together. You can view your own or someone else’s. Or everybody’s.

Such a morass is ripe for confusion, which is where the next great innovation comes in: tagging. By now everybody uses tags to sort information, but their usefulness is easy to underestimate. Users can add any number of these descriptive keywords to their bookmarks. On del.icio.us, Webmonkey is tagged variously with web, webdesign, html, reference, css, programming, design, tutorial, tutorials, webdev, tips, resource, development – the list goes on. The proliferation of tags makes it easy to find links relevant to a particular subject: just go to http://del.icio.us/tag/webdev to find all links tagged with “webdev” – or triangulate by searching on the intersection of multiple tags: http://del.icio.us/tag/css+reference+webdev. Compared to the hierarchical limitations of putting things in folders, say, using intersecting tags is deliciously freeing.