All About Delicious

Transcript of Delicious report by Lid for Episode 12/2008 

How many times have you bookmarked a site, or put it in your favorite’s folder at work, only to get home and think: “oh no…bugger!”

This is where social bookmarking comes in really handy.

The coolest thing about social bookmarking is that you can access your bookmarks (Firefox People), or your favorites (IE People), from anywhere; home, work or a friend’s computer.

It is pretty much an online home for your favorite’s folder.

The other nice thing about social bookmarking sites is that they allow you to share your favorite sites and pages with friends, family, and colleagues – if you want to – or, you can mark your bookmarks as private.

Delicious is considered the original social bookmarking site, and this is the one I wanted to focus on today.

It was created in 2003 by Joshua Schachter as an informal way to share Web pages between his friends. From there it pretty much took off, and in December 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious for some huge amount of money that has never been disclosed.

Now, it has more than 3 million users and 100 million bookmarked URL’s.

But why should you use Delicious?

Well, let’s say you’re a Web developer who uses the Web to find specifications, or converters, or sites that offer snippets of code. There are so many out there, it gets tricky keeping up.

If you bookmark or favorite it in your browser, you’d usually file it under one category.  For instance, let’s say you find a great color palette site. On your computer, it goes under Tools; on Delicious, you can tag it Tools, CSS, Colors, Palettes – you get the idea. Whatever key words or tags will help you find it later on. – Delicious makes finding your saved stuff a lot easier

To sign up, first go to Delicious and sign up for a free account. Don’t worry about the strange spelling of delicious that you may have seen; originally the URL was del.icio.us, nowadays you can just type in delicious.com and you’ll be redirected.

While you’re signing up, you’ll see a couple of toolbar buttons to add to your browser, grab them, they’re useful. The nice thing about Delicious is that it doesn’t put yet another toolbar in your browser, just the two buttons.

The first one “My delicious” will take you, once you’ve signed up, to your page on delicious so you can get to your bookmarks with one click from your browser.

The second button “tag this” is how you add new bookmarks to your delicious page. Whenever you come across a Web page you want to save, hit the tag button. This opens up a new window that automatically shows the URL of the page you are on, and the page title. You can add a description if you like, but the most important thing is to add the tags. These tags will help you find your bookmarks later.

On delicious, tags are separated by a space, no comma; in the tag section, type in as many tags as you need and it is saved to your delicious page. One word on tags though, they need to be single words – that is, they can’t contain spaces.

The beauty of this type of system especially for those of us who are useless at filing, is that it makes filing really, really easy.

Imagine hunting for a site you came across 6 months ago if you keep your bookmarks in your browser, you know that it was about colors, but you can’t remember whether you filed it under CSS, Palette’s, Color, or the one you’ve forgotten, tools. If you’re anything like me, you can end up spending ten minutes wading through the chaos you call your bookmarks and possibly not finding it anyway. This doesn’t happen with Delicious. Go to CSS or go to color, even Tools – and voila there it is, under each tag.

This is why tags are so important.

The social aspect of social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks, and to view the pages that have been bookmarked by others under specific tags.

So let’s go back to the Web developer example; you can search tags for CSS and see what others are saying. It will show the pages that have most recently been tagged, but you can sort the information by popularity, meaning the number of people who have bookmarked that page.

While social sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Mixx allow for dialogue among members, Delicious does not. Nor do you vote, review or comment on other people’s submissions. All you are doing is saving a site as a favorite.

However, Delicious does have a “hotlist.” The hotlist can be found on the home page of delicious and it consists of the most recently bookmarked pages on the Web; pages that have been bookmarked by many individuals at that current point in time.

If you have a website or blog, you may find it interesting to go and search for your keywords – for instance tech talk radio – no spaces remember – and see if it has been bookmarked, and by how many.

So today’s lesson is, tying your bookmarks to only one computer is no longer the most efficient way to work, neither is hoarding them for yourself.

Put your favorites on the web, share them with friends and peers, and have access to your favorite pages anytime and anywhere, and don’t forget to go and check whether you’ve been delicioused.

If you have any questions, send me an e-mail – lid at techtalkradio dot com dot au – or just chat to me on Twitter – http://twitter.com/MadLid.

Over and out!

StumbleUpon

Transcript of Lid‘s report from Tech Talk Episode 11/2008  

I’ve been having a chat with a few people recently about StumbleUpon, and most people seem to think that it’s a bookmarking site.  While it can be used to store and tag your favorite sites and pages – much like the original bookmarking site del.icio.us – it can be so much more than just being a place to dump all the junk from your favorite’s folder.

StumbleUpon is a social network; a website that gives its users a new way to experience the Web; one that is largely based on a recommendation system.

I’m sure you’ve seen the ‘stumble’ button at the bottom of blog posts, usually alongside the Digg and Reddit buttons.

When you ‘Stumble’ a post, you are adding it to the StumbleUpon database.  By giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, you are telling the StumbleUpon community what you really think about that post or website.

When you thumb something up it is automatically added to your StumbleUpon list of ‘liked’ pages and this is why a lot of people use it a bookmarking tool.

But, adding content is only one way to use StumbleUpon; the other is to receive content.

Instead of searching for specific topics using search engines, Stumble Upon users tag the subjects they are interested in and then surf that topic ‘channel’ of the web.

Stumbleupon makes it easy by providing a browser plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox that, randomly takes you, with a click of the Stumble button, to sites that fall under your selected tags.

So, why should you give StumbleUpon a go?

Because StumbleUpon is known for its ability to send massive amounts of traffic, from all over the world, to websites; it is an incredibly powerful tool if you are trying to establish a following for your blog, website, brand or product.

Once your content is in there, other stumblers will – well – stumble across it, and it if is good enough, useful enough, they’ll thumb it up and link to it. It’s a gentle traffic pusher, consistent and continuous, sending hundreds or thousands of visitors a day.  And continuous is important, because while hitting front page of Digg can send you tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days, and cause your server to crash under the load, it is a short lived spike that does not continue to send you traffic.

How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?

I’ve been stumbling for nearly a year, but originally I used it as a bookmarking site, without knowing about its other cool features.  More recently though, I’ve begun adding friends, stumbling other peoples sites, and other people have stumbled my posts.  In the last month, two posts on blogwell were stumbled, and they now bring in between 100 – 6000 unique visitors daily – over the past 30 days, blogwell has had 97,000 visitors from StumbleUpon alone.

So if you’re interested in getting to know StumbleUpon, visit the site, join and download the toolbar, which is available for both IE and Firefox, install it and start setting up your StumbleUpon homepage.

Before you add your site, go to the reviews page to see whether it’s already been listed – you never know, someone may have stumbled some of your stuff.  If not, start by going to your sites homepage and clicking the blue ‘thumbs up’ symbol that has ‘I like it!’ next to it – it’ll turn green, to show that you have now stumbled.

This should open up a panel that allows you to write a short description about your site and tag it with specific keywords – and this is part of the trick – make sure that you tag each page well so that StumbleUpon sends other stumblers that have similar tags to visit you.

While it is not considered good practice to stumble your own material, if you’ve created a great post that just begs to be promoted, ask a friend to submit it for you, or if you’ve been thumbing up other people’s content and contributing to the StumbleUpon community for a while, it’s okay to stumble your own post on occasion.

If you truly want to benefit from StumbleUpon, take Muhammad’s advice from a few weeks ago.  Get to know the community, check out and join the groups that most interest you, tag your favorite subjects, and make sure you click the thumbs up button in your toolbar every time you come across an amazing site, it only takes a few seconds.

If you want a more in depth guide to StumbleUpon, check out: A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon on Dosh Dosh

If you enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon, or have any other social media questions, please e-mail lid at techtalkradio dot com dot au – and I’ll do my best to hunt down the answer