del.icio.us

In the last couple of days, I’ve been doing a lot of business administration research on Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization for businesses. One title that has been coming up frequently in forums and searches is del.icio.us. Having no idea what this was and blaming my Libra curiosity as well as my geek hag characteristic I started researching and Goggled del.icio.us. My self learning Tech education continues to become more Gumbo than Chicken Noodle soup.

While people are becoming less communicative in the walking (especially the business) world and plugging remotely into the virtual one; Yahoo is continually and aggressively moving forward in effort to be top dog in everything online and to administration needs.

Yahoo bought del.icio.us in order to bring new features and servers to their users; which is a social book marking service mainly used by the IT savvy. The power of community is ever present online and while some may not stop to add our voice on the street, three times the amount will in the power of online communities. Del.icio.us looks to be anther neighborhood. For those who are computer efficient but IT inefficient, you may feel like a greaser (1950s) - from the wrong side of the tracks.

Your del.icio.us account requires a download which could discourage the IT challenged. The download takes only a moment and requires you to close and re open your browser. However, once you have your new account, you’re left to wonder “what now”?

Directly under your profile links is ‘Hot Now’. Looking at the link titles alone perplexed me. There was a posting called Legend of the BloodNinja which read like a bad IM session from a stranger that picks your IM name at random in desperate hope of communication that will eventually lead to an online date (to be polite). This was followed by news of the latest program release by MSN and that was followed by Nano talk. NOTE: Nano - A prefix meaning one-billionth.

On the right side of the web site you’ll see a listing of ‘Tags To Watch’. Funny was the first ‘Tag’ and I pondered again, which holds the majority of reasons for use - Personal or Work Related? In order to keep my curiosity business related I click on Business. Each tag has a list of subjects that you can click on. But what my voyeur nature was more interested in was how many other people saved the tag in their sharable profile. By seeing “saved by” 29 people / 234 people / 920 people on different tags enticed me to click on the tag to know why so many people were saving the tag.

My first curiosity was MySpace: The Business of Spam. It was saved by 129 people and talked about the ingenious business marketing & advertising behind MySpace. Almost every one I know has a MySpace profile including myself. I got tired of being asked why I didn’t know about a particular event when it was clearly posted on their MySpace; “don’t you have a MySpace profile”? I do now.

After reading the mildly interesting theory of the MySpace beginnings I decided to ‘Save This’ in my profile. However I couldn’t find the ‘Save This’ link inside the article. I stumbled around for a while before I realized that I was transported to a different web site from del.icio.us. So I pressed the back arrow button and there next to the title was ‘Save This’. Ahhhhhhh Got it. I decide this is worth keeping so that many other people can read about (in my opinion) the newest form of Spam. After saving the link I go to My Bookmarks and see that I now have 1 saved link for my newest neighborhood to enjoy.

While most of what is on del.icio.us is Tech Talk soup there are some very interesting articals, news releases and references for us not so savvy tech people. Rather or not it has a future even with Yahoo’s name behind it remains to be known. It looks like Yahoo gained more an advantage from the workings of del.icio.us while del.icio.us hasn’t gained much from Yahoo’s branding.

del.icio.us