Just a few tips on how to make good use of del.icio.us (nothing new to veterans here).

There seem to be two camps when it comes to strategies for tagging. One promotes strict homogenity (tag consistently and as most others tag), the other promotes tagging off the tip of your head.

What works best for me is to apply tags consistently for all types of metadata for a resource, but freely associative for the rest. It is actually no big problem if you have a typo or two in your tags or if you want to rename them later. del.icio.us provides an interface for (batch-) renaming tags, so cleaning them up is a snap.

examples for metatags

qualifiers

_daily, _weekly, _monthly, _2009, … (for flagging items you know you want to check at certain intervals)
*read/review, *inbox, *sometimes,… (for flagging items that are actionable upon)
:interesting, :useful, :idiotic, :funny,… (for flagging the quality)

format

.blog, .wiki, …

It’s useful to assign a tag signifying the format (notice the dot). You want to filter your bookmarks by format later (show me all blogs, not all ressources where the concept blog came to mind.)

addressee

A very nice use case for del.icio.us is to create a shared recommendation space between friends or co-workers (to:flat_erik) or defining intra-group tags, which every member of the group uses to share relevant links (to:gtd_potatoes). If you want me to point me to a ressource, tag it with to:saurierduval and I will pick it up.

conversations

It’s easy to track your conversations on the web. Many people tag entries they commented on with *mycomments or threads in forums they participated in with *mythreads.

credit

via:boingboing, via:kottke,…