del.icio.us and nutritious

Ben Casnocha’s post on his use of del.icio.us prompted me to post my own thoughts. While it took me a long time to use it, I now find the service indispensible.

I’ve been an information packrat forever–the piles of magazines, clippings, and other articles in my parents’ home attests to this.

When I was at Stanford, the remarkable Sara Little-Turnbull got me started collecting clips in imitation of her own Process of Change laboratory.

With the advent of the browser, I made liberal use of bookmarking.

But for someone who bookmarks articles in addition to sites, the permanent, nearly unmanageable bookmarking functionality built into most browsers is hopelessly clumsy.

With the profusion of data thanks to RSS feeds, it’s more important than ever to have a way to manage information. Prior to del.icio.us, I actually pasted URLs into emails that I sent to myself–a cumbersome and unreliable method.

del.icio.us allows me much more flexibility…and with 288 tagged items in just 3 months, it’s much more manageable than trying to sort all of those within “Manage Favorites.”

Like Ben, I use three principal tags: yehblog (items I might want to blog), yehcomment (comments I’ve made on other blogs–started before CoComment came out), and yehlater (stuff I want to look at at greater length). Thanks to Ben, I’m going to start tagging yehprint (stuff to print) as well, though thanks to the miracle of VPNs, I can generally print to the office no matter where I am in the world.

What I would love now is the ability to set up group feeds so that I can see what all of my friends are looking at in a single, de-duplicated feed. Are you listening Joshua Schachter?