What, Delicious still exists? Yes. They are doing fine it seems. I use the tool since 2006. How do I use it now for content curation with the new design and features?

Most people heard of Delicious last time when it seemed that it would be killed off by Web dinosaur Yahoo.

The recent history of Delicious

That would be no surprise as Yahoo has a track record of either neglecting or closing down formerly attractive services. Just recently they did it with a very promising startup called Vizify that offered hosting for automated websites taking their content straight from your social profiles.

Indeed Delicious is owned by the YouTube founders aka AVOS since 2011 and they brought it back to life.

At first they wanted to make some kind of Pinterest competitor offering stacks instead of pinboards but they gave up the idea and returned Delicious to its original idea: social bookmarking. Most social bookmarking sites have been swamped by SPAM or rendered obsolete by more modern social media services. Even the likes of Twitter have brought down interest in social bookmarking.

AVOS battled the downward spiral by acquiring Twitter based service trunk.ly that collected the links you shared

on Twitter and other social sites and turn them back into bookmarks, alas automated ones. At first it seemed it would be just another axequisition like the ones we knew from Yahoo but Delicious has added some of the features I loved trunk.ly for by now. For example you can collect your shared links from elsewhere on Delicious without additional effort.

So here we are now. The revamped Delicious is still here and I’m impressed. I really tried hard to find an alternative along the way and trunk.ly was my favorite so in the end I just stayed with Delicious and prepared (I backup all my social bookmarks automatically to Diigo) for a demise but also hoping to be able to stay using it.

Forget social bookmarking

First of all, this post is not about social bookmarking. I won’t tell you how to “submit to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit or StumbleUpon” or other crap second rate marketers are trying to convince you to do for a what seems like a decade. Reddit or StumbleUpon aren’t even about social bookmarking.You don’t submit either like Delicious or some kind of web directory. Just forget everything you think you know about social bookmarking for a minute.

Think content curation

I want to talk about content curation today. It’s not just a buzzword, that sounds cooler so that it replaces the old one nobody wants to hear anymore. What happens today is that social sharing (mostly of links) is the prevalent practice of Web users.

The downside of omnipresent content sharing is that you get overwhelmed by links. Nobody could cope with curation. Curation means that some people, sometimes experts but often amateurs are scanning the Web for you sorting out and choosing the best content to read or view.

Content curation is a classic solution that benefits all the parties involved: publishers, content creators, curators, readers, tool makers.

Yes, there are lot of modern tools used for content curation. You will find whole lists of tools where often it is difficult to choose one. Sometimes you get advised to use several at once. Common content curation tools are Hootsuite or Buffer.These are good tools but what they do or rather make you do is to automate content sharing to your social media audiences. This is not what I do when I curate content.

What’s the goal of curation?

As noted above the goal of curation is to limit the sheer amount of links shared and to replace quantity with quality by way of selection.

Who really benefits when I “share” links while I’m asleep using Hootsuite or Buffer? The reader? I’m not sure. I rather share just a few links throughout the day and week and make sure my followers aren’t swamped and don’t see the same things shared over and over. My favorite kind of curation is still compiling lists of links for blog posts.

I usually do not create standalone lists these days in order not to overwhelm my readers with the onslaught of resources

but I add links to my exiting articles, either within the text itself or below as “read more” options. I publish around 12 articles per month on topics like blogging, social media , and search of different publications. I don’t always manage to link out to additional resources but when I do I mostly use Delicious for that purpose. I need to locate the resources I think of quickly or find new ones in cases where I haven’t bookmarked them already.

Simply Delicious

As you see I have almost 15k links on Delicious. Some of them as old as 2006. That’s a lot of links to organize. I mostly use Delicious for work, that is I collect links about blogging, social media and search, a bit of general marketing and tech is also there and sometimes I bookmark things related to health, psychology or self-improvement. I like to keep it simple.

I save my parkour bookmarks on Pinterest and the local German stuff on my computer so you don’t get much off-topic stuff. More importantly, I don’t get confused and distracted at work by other topics either.

Still most of my bookmarks are tagged with at least three tags. I categorize mostly based on the

• topic (e.g. seo, blogging or socialmedia),
• kind of content (issues, howto, techniques)
• company or site involved (Google, Twitter)
• type of resource (tools, list).

Based on this common sense categorization I can quickly locate almost all things I’d like to refer to in a blog post. I have lots of secondary tags to look up whenever needed too. So for example I looked  for content-curation for this article here as the partial screens shot above shows. I simply search for

[@onreact.com content-curation]

My methodology of categorization is pretty straightforward and descriptive so I hope others can use it too but I doubt many people do. Bookmarking is not very social these days, not even on Delicious anymore.

The focus is clearly on finding links based on their topic when I need them.

So my main disciplines like blogging, social media, SEO, search, social networking are among my most active tags. To find my links when I need them I first have to save them for later. I do it manually (several links per day usually) but they also get saved via Twitter and with some automation on my side using IFTTT.

Supercharge Delicious with IFTTT

You probably have heard of IFTTT by now. In case you haven’t , go right there and look it up. This site is like an interface between all your online services. It lets you create or use third party “recipes” to automate otherwise tedious or repetitive tasks. For example, I let IFTTT bookmark every post I publish on my blog automatically on Delicious.

I don’t do that to “submit my site to Delicious” or something but because I in most cases forgot to bookmark my own stuff. So later when I searched for additional resources on a given topic I would find everybody else but not my own articles.

As noted above I also backup every Delicious bookmark to Diigo via IFTTT too. When Delicious is undergoing maintenance I can look up my links on Diigo then.

You can also get your links from Facebook and Google+ automatically bookmarked on Delicious via IFTTT.

Get on Delicious to get inbound links

In case you want your resources to get linked on one of my blog posts make sure I bookmark them first on Delicious. Otherwise I won’t find them again probably when hurrying up to finish a post for one of the blogs I write for. I sometimes search via DuckDuckGo, Blekko or even Google for them but often I just get the most popular posts rather than the ones I prefer. So I often end up without many outgoing links and you lose incoming links.

(CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons image by Nick Nguyen