How to Use Delicious to Network your Website

Networking Your Website with Rita Wilhelm

Delicious or Del.icio.us, found on the Internet at http://delicious.com, is a social bookmarking site that allows users to share their content from a centralized location to other users from around the globe. The site takes advantage of social networking and community in order to allow users to share content. You can use Delicious to bookmark your favorite sites on the Internet so you can access your favorites regardless of what computer you are on. It also allows you to share your bookmarks with others and to view what other members find interesting on the Internet. This can be a great benefit for those who want to increase exposure to their sites.

It is very easy to get started with Delicious. You will need to set up an account, install a quick extension program to your browser and have content you want to share. For networking purposes, if you have a blog site with continually changing content you can use your blog software to automatically tag and submit your content to Delicious. If you have static content, you can use the pertinent links to bookmark your information. One of the most important aspects of using Delicious is to optimize your tagging and descriptions so others can easily find useful information.

When you are adding a bookmark to Delicious, you will be asked for various pieces of information. The link is important so others can easily navigate to your site. You should also have relevant tags or categories. For example, if you are linking to a band site, you may want to have a music tag or get even more specific with using pop music or classical music tags. The description of the site will allow others to view your opinion on the site or a summary of the site’s content. You can choose whichever method is a more effective marketing tool.

Delicious boasts the largest number of shared bookmarks on the Internet today. Not only does Delicious allow you to share sites with other people for marketing, networking and social purposes but it also allows you to contain your bookmarks for personal use. You can easily access personal bookmarks you do not want to share simply by clicking the “do not share” toggle when entering a site. This allows you to keep your personal links private and to share your other links when useful. Whether you own a personal or professional site, Delicious allows you to network to millions of people from around the world in order to increase exposure to your favorite sites.

Rita Wilhelm is founder and president of SnapMonkey Inc, which is a company that provides both online marketing consulting to businesses, as well as easy-to-use web-based technologies to help businesses effectively promote themselves on the web.

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How to Use Delicious to Network your Website

The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital (by Joe Lamantia)

August 30, 2007 03:17 PM | Posted in: Networks and Systems

This is a small site with modest traffic. But it is still the case that a substantial set of inbound links lead people from diverse origins - search engines, blogs, content aggregators, feed readers, directories, etc. - to many destinations within the site every day. Some of these connections are visible in the del.icio.us tag clouds that appear with individual postings, my contribution to the Web's ongoing collective experiment with tagging and social bookmarking.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu named this set of connections and the social relationships associated with them in the early 1970s, coining the term social capital, and thereby inspiring legions of civic and international organizations to create development, investment, and management strategies for this new valuable kind of resource.

But what is the value of the network?

Fast forward a bit, and we can see that no matter how you choose to calculate that value, Google has built a business relying the new resource of cumulative social capital, using it via mechanisms such as latent semantic indexing.

And we can see that in giving form and focus to the idea of social capital, Bourdieu set the conceptual stage for the recent explosion of social media and networking applications. Simultaneously destinations - albeit of unknown lifespan - and business ventures, the social networks are recent exemplars of longtime cultural movements of reification, virtualization, and visualization of fields - another key concept identified by Bourdieu.

Behind the scenes, the information architecture that solidifies the limited social capital of this site in physical / digital form is a motley collection of disparately named HTML files, tag destination pages, cgi-powered content streams, RSS feeds, local search results sets, etc. The prospect of getting another publishing platform to mimic this miscellany was - like tuning an instrument to play songs composed with notes from another music system - not something I could do as quickly and cheaply.

And so in combination with the perpetual urgency of the DIY mindset, the imperative of preserving the value of the existing store of social capital made the decision to upgrade along an existing path to MT4 simple.

Architecturally, this is the equivalent of sticking with the brand name you know well.

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The Value of the Network: Links As Social Capital (by Joe Lamantia)