For those of you who don’t know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site where people can store links to their favorite websites and access them from anywhere rather than being tied to a single computer.

One of the cool things about del.icio.us is being able to search for websites that others have bookmarked with del.icio.us. This website works with what is known as tags. These tags are words that people use to categorize their bookmarks. For example, you could have several websites related to the Battle of Antietam and when you bookmark them with del.icio.us you might give them the tag Antietam. Then the next time you want all of your bookmarked sites on Antietam you simply click on the Antietam tag within your del.icio.us.

Here is a link to the CommonCraft Show called Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Another interesting thing about social bookmarking is that you can subscribe to these tags via an RSS feed. For example, you can do a del.icio.us tag search for Gettysburg by entering the URL, http://del.icio.us/tag/gettysburg into your web browser. Once the results appear, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you will see an icon that says RSS feed for this page. If you click on this link (or right-click copy link location) you can add this RSS feed to your Feedly account. Then, every time someone tags a website with the word Gettysburg, it will appear in your RSS aggregator.

You can also check out The Connected Classroom wiki on Social Bookmarking and RSS Feeds.

Try it out and let me know what you think.