All My Yum-Yums in One Place: How I Use Del.icio.us
So, I’ve met a bunch of people lately who don’t use del.icio.us. This sort of surprised me, because I find del.icio.us to be a really useful tool. My guess is that people use del.icio.us as a place to store sites and posts they want to revisit. In lieu of a bookmarks or favorites within their browser or something. But most people who want to find their favorite stuff easily already use an RSS feed of some sort to aggregate Web content, so why spend time updating a del.icio.us account too?
I use my del.icio.us account as a Web portfolio–a place where an interested follower, client, friend or employer can easily see what I do on the Web in an easy, one-stop-shop format. I save and tag my social profiles and some of my favorite blog posts from this blog and On the PRowl, as well as content my peers have created about me. I write a few sentences in each description to give a taste of what I tagged and why the link is meaningful to who I am on the Web. I also make sure that every tag I use is bundled. So, if you want to check out what I’ve done with my own content, you can look in the MyContent bundle, and if you want to see what my friends have to say about me, you can explore what’s in the WebFriends bundle, and so on. Maybe I’m just making it easier for people to stalk me, but I think that for young people especially, having a place to showcase what you’ve been working to build is very useful. Gotta show all the rockstars we look up to what we’re capable of and why we’re awesome.
As you build your career and your reputation, I recommend creating a purpose-built personal del.icio.us page as a public portfolio of who you are on the Web. But your own content alone doesn’t fully capture who you are socially–including what other people say about you gives a clearer picture of your personality, so potential employers, new friends and content consumers can see who you are on the Social Web. I tell my peers to be themselves in their various social profiles and to create content they can be proud of, but I also encourage students and young professionals to make it easy for the established rockstars out there to check us out and see all the great things we do on the Web.
How is del.icio.us useful for you? What do you think of using del.icio.us as a portfolio for your social presence?
Amanda, Social Media | Comments (8)8 Responses to “All My Yum-Yums in One Place: How I Use Del.icio.us”
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i am a huge del.icio.us geek! it is such a simple yet useful site to keep pretty much anything you do or read on the net like you said.
I have found it to be a great tool to point my friends at when they are looking for some information from me.
I would recommend del.icio.us to any geek to be. :D
Nice post here, Amanda. Del.icio.us (just found out this morning that delicious.com also works — and it’s much faster to type) has proven valuable to me, too. Here are a couple of other ways that I use it.
* I use the “commented” tag for all posts that I comment on — like this one. This helps me — and anyone else who might be looking — keep track of which posts were moving me to action.
* I click the “do not share” box for links that I need to keep private. This could be for posts about my employer’s competition, embarrassingly bad songs that I don’t want anyone to know that I like, or posts I’m compiling for an upcoming client presentation.
* I use the “for:username” convention to share links with other members of my del.icio.us network. (Amanda, check the “links for you” section of your del.icio.us account now!)
Here’s a podcast episode I published last year with tips on getting the most out of del.icio.us: http://tinyurl.com/268o8m
We’re trying to understand how to tag better. Seems it is an art. We’ve bookmarked this page for future reference, and plan to listen to Bryan Person’s podcast! Thanks for making the learning process so easy!
Thank you for your commments Jeff, Bryan and Mary-Lynn!
Veeery clever. I see a new account in my future, thanks for the idea! I use de.icio.us for links I’d like to share w/ friends (the links show up on my blog in a daily link roll), but I also tag a link as “wanna” if it’s something I want to give or receive as a gift. I’ve found this handy come Christmas time when my boyfriend’s mom asks me what I’d like for Christmas. I have to tell her something, but I can never think of anything! I pull up my ‘wanna’ tag and BAM! a whole list of goodies I’d never remember otherwise. (This seems very self-serving in comparison to example, but you asked!). ;)
Stellar idea Amanda, and a well executed del.icio.us page. This is great advice for “future rockstars”, but I think just about anyone could benefit from following a similar strategy to track and gather all online activity. I also love it when people take the time to add descriptions to their bookmarks, it makes the service much more usable.
I’ve had a del.icio.us account for a while but only really started using it after having some people like Bryan (in his podcast) explain how beneficial it can really be. Now, my first impulse is to save pages I find to del.icio.us for myself and anyone else that finds my page.
But, one experiment that I’ve been doing with del.icio.us is to have a tag for each of my blog posts and save all the links I used with that tag. So, if someone wants to see all the links in my post with more context than just the anchor text, they can also check out my del.icio.us page for it.
[...] and after a while, I just forgot about del.icio.us… until two things happened: 1) I read Amanda Gravel’s post on using del.icio.us as an online portfolio and 2) I started seriously compiling all my RSS feeds [...]