Indescribably Del.icio.us

Ever find a great web page and want to bookmark it? Only you're favorite list is longer than War and Peace and you don't want to take the time to weed out the bad ones in order to be able to see anything? And, anyway, you only want to keep the web address for a few days.

Well, your answer is del.icio.us. First of all, you have to like the name. You are used to the .com, .edu, .org, and .net domains, and you may come across .mil and .gov web domains,. If you're someone Internet savvy, you'll also know that countries outside the United States have two-letter comains: .ca for Canada, .uk for the United Kingdom, .tv for Tuvalu (a group of islands in the Pacific. Someone realized their two-letter domain is perfect for TV shows). Well, the United States has a two-letter domain: .us. It's usually used by state governments, but rarely by others. Del.icio.us was clever enough to use this as part of their name.

Del.icio.us is billed as "social bookmarking," allowing people to share their bookmarks with others. And this is useful: you can go to the site and look for bookmarks for a particular subject. The bookmarks are ranked by how many people have marked them. Thus, if you're looking for, say, "Siena College," a search on del.icio.us will show you the most popular sites with "Siena College" in them. This can help you pinpoint what links might be the best for a particular subject.

But even if you don't use it for that, del.icio.us lets you set up a free account for your favorite bookmarks. Anyone can see it (here is mine), so you can share sites with friends. And, most importantly, you can mark sites in order to go back to them later.

There's even a small javascript that you can add to your favorites on your web browser that let's you easily mark any page you are looking at. Just click, add categories, and click "submit." You return to the page automatically, knowing you can find it in your del.icio.us bookmarks.

Anyone can set up an account, and it's free. Give it a try.