David Weinberger recently posted a transcript of a talk given by Joshua Schachter at the Berkman Center, which revealed some interesting figures: currently del.icio.us has 10,000,000 posts with 5,000,000 unique links and 500,000 tags… There is a lot of collaboratively prefiltered and tagprocessed knowledge in there, but how can you access it?

Well, I don’t know, but there are many tools available which provide some sort of filter on the overwhelming incoming linkstream, here are a few I like:

fac.etio.us

fac.etio.us provides faceted layers on about 200,000 links from del.icio.us. Available facetes are: organization (Amazon, Apple, BBC, …), activity (art, business, design, …), place (Australia, Canada, China, …), technology (blog, css, internet, …), attribute (color, cool, daily, …), genre (article, community, diy, …), tag (art, blog, css, …), contributor, site (del.icio.us, en.wikipedia.com, msdn.microsoft.com, …), and date.

You can combine them any way you want, I love the organization facete. You can search for funny links at Microsoft, or productivity links at the BBC, and so on. (The project seems to be sleeping, though.)

popul.icio.us

popul.icio.us provides a nice overview of the most popular links which have been added for the first time within the last 24 hours / 48 hours / 7 days / 30 days and it also shows the all time favorites. This is a very low effort way of keeping up to date with trends that might emerge.

CollaborativeRank

CollaborativeRank takes an interesting approach: it computes the relevance of search results based on the expertise of del.icio.us users for each tag. It also filters out duplicates, and seems to put more weight on recently added/tagged links.

The most useful users for each tag are displayed at the top of each page, their collection usually also is a good starting point for finding interesting stuff. (It also has a list of the 500 Top Del.icio.us Users.)