Tech Tip Thursday: patently del.icio.us

Sorocco started it…now both Buchanan and I are becoming converts.  What is it?  Del.icio.us.

What in the world is del.icio.us?  When first asked, I told Buchanan (in the most unhelpful way) that it is "social bookmarking."  I think he was worried it was some disease his high school home economics teacher warned the class about.  While it is technically "social bookmarking," that term generally is gibberish to the average person.  Let me try my own explanation.

Del.icio.us is essentially an online bookmark site that asks you to (when you create a bookmark) pick one or more words categorizing the website.  For instance, other people have created links to my "Downloading Patent Copies" post and have categorized it as:  patents, useful, blogs, and/or brevets (I have no idea why "brevets"…).  One main benefit of doing this is that you can later search through all of your own bookmarks to find all of the bookmarks you previously tagged as "useful," or "patents," or "blogs," thereby quickly finding the link you were looking for.

A second benefit is the aggregation of everyone else’s categorizations.  For instance, you can find all links other people have tagged as "patent" by searching http://del.icio.us/tag/patent (replace "patent" with any other word to perform other searches).  Then, you could set up an RSS search of the patent "tag"…http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/patent…you get the point.  The possibilities are endless. 

I’ve only been using it for the last 2 weeks…but think it has some real potential.  If you want to see my page (to see what crazy stuff I am linking as "save for later reference")…the link is here:  http://del.icio.us/jurisnipper

One more link to the road.  The "hottest" web pages and blog posts on the Internet (as determined by individuals creating del.icio.us bookmarks in their accounts) can be found here.

Homework assignment (if you want to learn more):  Buchanan’s del.icio.us 101 post, Sorocco’s  del.icio.us Screencast and these two articles.

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Tech Tip Thursday

With the rethink(ip) project…I’ve been falling behind on my Tech Tip Thursday/Inventor Roundup Friday posts.  Suffice it to say that I haven’t seen any articles lately worth rounding up for inventors (so that is why the roundup posts have been awol).

On the Tech Tip Thursday (pretend it is Thursday, not Friday)…here’s my latest, the Google Edition of Tech Tip Thursday:

1.  Cooking with Google.  A fun site where you can look in your fridge, find a hand full of ingredients and perform a special Google search of recipe websites for recipes with said ingredients. 

2.  Gmail tips.  Got Gmail?  Here’s a link to a website full of Gmail tips, including:

Gmail Tip #3: How to Maintain ‘Notes’
Gmail Tip #9: New Mail Notification!
Gmail Tip #11: Connecting Securely
Gmail Tip #12: ‘Archiving’ Explained
Gmail Tip #26: Creating a Pseudo Address Group!
Gmail Tip #27: Adding Hotmail Contacts to Gmail
Gmail Tip #28: ‘Gmail Notifier’ released to beta!
Gmail Tip #33: Auto-forward received Gmail!
Gmail Tip #34: Gmail on your Palm!
Gmail Tip #35: Gmail on your Palm! - Part 2
Gmail Tip #36: Some Email Management Tips
Gmail Tip #38: Google Gmail Minibrowser

3.  Gmail.  Don’t got Gmail…send me an email (snipper@gmail.com) and I’ll set you up.

4.  The Official Google Cheat-sheet.  Now you have no excuse for not finding stuff faster on Google.

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