Delicious is simply delicious

Let's talk about something other than Twitter this week - let's talk about Delicious (formally del.icio.us*, pronounced "delicious"). Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for sharing, storing and discovering your bookmarks.

I don't know about you, but I don't like how browsers store bookmarks - those great web sites you find that you want to store end up getting lost when you buy a new laptop, or when you use more than one type of browser - so prior to social bookmarking sites, I would store my favorite web sites in a txt document on my hard-drive. Then came along social bookmarking web sites - leading social bookmark is Delicious, where I can not only store bookmarks, I can tag them with my own keywords, discover web sites bookmarked by others and share my bookmarks with the world.

Delicious is also clever enough to track how many times a particular Web site gets tagged or bookmarked and it presents the most popular bookmarks on its homepage, which is a great way to

It's definitely worth giving Delicious a try - visit the site, scroll down the homepage and read the headlines on the most popular bookmarks, click on the "Explore Tags" tab and see what's there, search a keyword from your industry (heck put in your company name), set up an account, add some bookmarks, and add some bookmarks (click on the save a new bookmark tool from the top right of every page).

Social bookmarking is worth exploring and Delicious is a great way to dip your toes into this Web 2.0 feature.

* The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.

The 411 on RSS

Let's turn back the clock a few years and talk about some technological oldies but goodies from the start of the Web 2.0 world.

I'm sure you've heard about RSS feeds, but can you tell me what RSS stands for and what is does?

RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication" and does exactly what is says it does, provides the technological means for real simple syndication of a web sites content, including blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video, into a standard format that is called a "feed" or "news feed." Typically RSS feeds contain headlines and short blurbs, but sometimes RSS feeds contain full articles.

The standardize feeds allows for web site owners to distribute their content out to individual news feed readers, and feed aggregator sites, like Google reader and it allows individuals to bring their favorite web site's content to their desktop or homepage.

RSS allows you to keep up to date with multiple Web sites, and gives you control over which headlines you decide to click on. Power to the People!