I am one of these curmudgeons who only uses delicious as a bookmark repository, not as a social tool. But it can also be a great publishing/speed-blogging tool. There’s a useful guide here to getting del.icio.us to automatically post your links to your blog each day.
Some of Martin Belam’s thoughts about how/why to use it are interesting:
The New York Times site probably won’t care if you send them a trickle of referrers from your bookmarked link, but lots of bloggers and smaller webmasters spend time gazing at their analytics software tracking down every incoming link that is sending them traffic. Bookmarking someone else’s site is a great potential way to get new eyeballs onto your blog pages.
Now, I’m not suggesting that you put together an evil bot army spamming people’s referrer logs of course – mind you, that works too – but if you remember to ‘test’ the published links on your site you’ll make sure that your URL is appearing in the referrer logs of the sites you’ve linked to.
Urgh, more potential for nice web technologies to be abused for spam.
But back on the automated posting of your delicious links to your blog – I looked into this about a month ago and got distracted for some reason, but I’m keen to get Gideon using it as he’s pretty good with delicious (my use of it is far more sporadic and frankly too personal, even with the ‘non-sharing’ option).
Anyway this is the page on delicious that lets you setup this tricky tool. Despite my private
There’s another way to get your delicious links on your blog, however – a ‘dynamic blogroll‘ that sits outside your main blog posts. Delicious makes it calls it a ‘linkroll’ and Typepad has a way to getting it up there.
The Westminster guys are doing this, but using the Google Reader. Brad Delong has long been doing the same thing with delicious (but you have to look hard to find it these days – it’s right down the far right).
Of course the downside is that it’s not integrated with your actual main blog feed – so doesn’t turn up in your own feed at all. But perhaps non-newsy bloggers this is somewhat suitable, as Delicious tends to be used for less contemporaneous links.
So, it’s a start. Surprisingly some of our other new bloggers are quite keen. I’m starting to recommend Google Reader to colleagues, rather than Bloglines. Bloglines does have a ‘clip/blog this’ tool but as everyone already has a Google account it’s easier to just use that.
