MidAdopting: del.icio.us Bookmarks using Firefox

I’ve given a fair amount of advice recently on how to make del.icio.us a usable service for normal people. There are a lot of benefits to using del.icio.us, which I’ll cover in a second. First, I’ll cover why you might not use it.

Del.icio.us will not benefit you if:

1. You are a privacy nut. Even though you can designate bookmarks as private, the information is sitting on Yahoo’s servers.
2. You don’t use bookmarks. Just like basecamp won’t help you if you’re bad at project management, and Google reader won’t help you if you don’t read a lot of blogs.
3. You are unwilling to spend a little time setting up your account (I’m talking about 2 hours here, which can be split up over several days.

Now that’s out of the way, del.icio.us is an immensely beneficial service to people who do a lot of browsing. It enables you to categorize sites or pages multiple ways, very quickly. It makes all of your bookmarks searchable and available from any computer with an internet connection. It allows for the easy dissemination of links, either using the ‘for:’ machine tags (for your contacts who also use the service) or you can use its data services for lightning-quick link-blogging.

Here’s how I use it:

1. I use the del.icio.us bookmarks extension for Firefox. Other methods (other plugins, bookmarklets, etc.) require extra keystrokes - this plugin looks at your bookmarks and those of all del.icio.us users and makes suggestions. It’s impressively accurate and highly useful.
2. I’ve switched to “Tags View” in the plugin settings (default is most recent tags, which I find useless), and select 5-10 of your most-used tags to replace your traditional bookmarks bar.
3. I tag everything with a few keywords, and then a high-level tag for how it will be used. This is either an action-based tag (’toread‘, ‘towatch’), or a context tag (’work’, ‘midadopter‘). ‘Toread‘ is a bit of a phenomenon on del.icio.us. Check it out for examples. I also use del.icio.us to collect information for presentations I’m giving. I’ll tag items with names like ‘dec5_presentation’ or something else unique so that I can easily refer to them later.
4. I use the description if I intend the bookmark for public sharing. Highlighting any text in Firefox will automatically send it to the description field when you hit the ‘tag’ button (CTRL-D). There’s a 255 character limit, so be mindful of that when choosing text.
5. I use the website search and the tags I use, to browse subjects for new material. Del.icio.us makes a great alternative-search tool for site discovery.

That’s about it - I’ve also set Firefox to suppress its normal bookmark menu and menubar, so there’s no confusion.

Installing the extension takes very little time, which means that setting up a new computer or account and seeding a browser with your bookmarks is an automatic process. Welcome to the network terminal.

Any other del.icio.us users out there? I’m certainly not the most advanced user, so I’m curious as to any advice or use cases might be floating around out there.

Further reading:

• 8 tips from Web Worker Daily 
• Posts about ‘del.icio.us’ on Lifehacker
• How to explain del.icio.us to your parents (delicious blog)
• Del.icio.us Tips Part One (a lot of what I’ve covered is here, plus more - apparently the FF extension supports FF keywords - very cool)
• Official Help Page - Lots of good stuff here, from the folks who know best.