The ubiquitous del.icio.us icon.
I discovered Del.icio.us a while ago (back when http://del.icio.us was a clever URL — before it became delicious.com,) and maybe you did too. Recently, I’ve found it more and more useful.
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking tool. Instead of storing your bookmarks in your browser, you save them to this website. Simple enough. The first advantage (and the reason I first moved my bookmarks to del.icio.us) is that everything becomes centralized. I used to bookmark things at home that I needed at work and vice versa. No longer.
Also, if you use the Firefox browser, you can get the del.icio.us add-on which adds buttons to your browser for one-touch bookmarking. Click the tag button and bookmark a webpage, add tags to help you find your bookmark, and share it or keep it private, your choice. Sharing bookmarks brings up a third advantage of this service: vetted links!
Do a search for a topic on del.icio.us and you can see how many people have bookmarked each search result. Sure, this can be ‘gamed‘ just like Google searches have been. But, when Google is just taking me to spam, I find del.icio.us searches can be surprisingly helpful. If a couple of hundred people have bookmarked it, it’s probably worth checking out.
Finally, there is the untapped potential of del.icio.us. At least, it’s untapped by me. Linkrolls can be created (for a blog like this one, say) so that links are automatically updated and sorted by del.icio.us. I could list my latest links, links I’ve tagged with ‘esltech’ or ‘blog’ etc. Very interesting oppotunity of which I have yet to avail myself. But, at least you have something to look forward to if you keep reading.
ESL Technology.com 
Interesting – so you can configure things so that every del.icio.us link you tag with, say, “ESLtech” could appear in your linkroll on the right column? I imagine that works with RSS syndication somehow?
I’d love to hear more about that, either via the blog or in person.
That’s my understanding. And, now that you’ve called me on it, I’ve had to look into it further. Here’s the scoop:
In a WordPress blog, such as this one, there are several widgets you can incorporate (look under the Design tab on the dashboard page,) including del.icio.us links. You can configure the number of links and the specific tags that are pulled, as you suggested, from your own (or someone else’s?) del.icio.us account.
I haven’t implemented this widget yet, but it would certainly be a convenient way to keep a link list up-to-date. If you try it, let me know what you think.
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