Fifteen Things I Learned on del.icio.us

Regulars here know that I am an avid del.icio.us user. Not only do I file my bookmarks away here, but I scan the site regularly to find new things to blog.

What you might not know is that del.icio.us can tell you a lot about how tech-savvy influencers perceive blogs, brands, Web sites, pop culture icons and more by running URLs through the service. This will tell you a) how many people have saved a particular link and b) how they are labeled by the community through tags.

Some notes: First, you can speed this up by grabbing this bookmarklet and dragging it to your favorites. Use it to check any URL. Second, every URL filed away in del.icio.us has its own RSS feed at the bottom of the page so that you can track the specific link. This is a must for all tech brands. Further, if you're in advertising or PR, be sure to run your campaign microsite URLs/media coverage links through the del.icio.us URL filter. You'll get great data for reports. Last but not least, keep in mind that the del.icio.us community is more tech savvy than most so the more geeky the link, the deeper the data. Also, this feature is sometimes slow to load.

So with that, here's a sample of 15 things I learned from the collective psyche that is del.icio.us. (Yea Seth, more diggbait)

• The MacBook Pro is on a lot of people's wish list
• Everyone gets that TechCrunch is about Web 2.0 and PaidContent.org is about media, but people have very different perspectives on what Fark largely covers. Some say news, others say humor.
• People who bookmarked Gnomedex were looking forward to seeing Adam Curry (a 2005 speaker) and to network
• One of Flickr's greatest attractions is its cavernous storage
• People use Odeo to search for music nearly as much as they do podcasts
• Some people found Subservient Chicken slightly disturbing. They called it strange or weird.
• AdAge kills AdWeek and some even tag it "PR"
• Drudge Report is considered a blog by many
• More people appear to be interested in what Mark Cuban has to say about business rather than sports
• The number one tag for comcast.com - bills
• Post Secret is art
• Dooce is funny
• My blog is tagged marketing more than it is PR, while Om Malik's broadband blog is tagged Web 2.0 more than it is telecom
• People perceive Bloglines more as a place for blogs than for news
• Best Buy is bookmarked far more than Circuit City or Frys.

If you find gems, leave them in comments. (UPDATE: Someone added this blog post to del.icio.us so you can track it here.)

Tags: del.icio.us

Comments

[Tom Markiewicz]

Thanks for this tip, Steve. I had no idea that URL deep search was there. I'll be using this regularly and if I find any more interesting ones I'll definitely post them.

[Quick Online Tips]

The del.icio.us community has compiled lots of third party del.icio.us tools too.

[Max Kalehof]

Steve,
The ability to subscribe to certain individuals' book marks is especially interesting to me. I find subscribing to people's bookmarks often to be more interesting than subscribing to those same people's blogs. Sometimes, people are great editors but can't write coherently. Moreover, I especially like subscribing to people's bookmark feeds because you can get to know them intimately, but in a passive way. At my work (Nielsen BuzzMetrics), several of my closest colleagues subscribe to one another's bookmark feeds. It sort of becomes a collaborative brainstorming, knowledge gathering process.

I wish someone would come up with a Trillian for social bookmarks. Del.icio.us is probably the best by nature of its adoption and network effect, but there are others which are better designed and more feature rich. I wish I could have the feature set I want, with the benefits of the network effect.

[ewdfdsaf]

the url bookmarlet doesn't work, you put the javascript address in the title but not in the actual address of the link.