I’ve been reading a lot lately about del.icio.us. I didn’t really get it at first–it just seemed like yet another way to share internet bookmarks that nobody would ever look at. Why would I want my friends to know which websites I visit? Is that a case of TMI?

My thinking’s changed, though. It seems to me that if we’re going to use tools like blogs, which are intended to allow web users from all over the world to communicate with each other, bring in new knowledge, and challenge one another’s ideas, del.icio.us’s “social bookmarking” concept is really just the next logical step. Social bookmarking is just what you think it is–just as Myspace, Facebook, etc are social networking sites, allowing users to find old and new friends based on their interests, incriminating photos, favorite bands, and the like–social bookmarking is the practice of sharing information (in the form of annotated and tagged bookmarks) with your network of friends, colleagues, and others.

Wikipedia’s entry on del.icio.us makes simple sense of it all.

What’s interesting to me is that the newest release of Firefox, which is the web browser I use (full disclosure: I use an iBook G4 at home), has eliminated the old-style bookmarks feature that we all know from Internet Explorer and the like. Instead, the Firefox people replaced that whole system with a built-in connection to del.icio.us. It took about five minutes to upgrade to Firefox 2.0 and import my old bookmarks into my del.icio.us account.

So if you’ve got some time and are interested in giving this a try, sign up for a del.icio.us account, import some bookmarks (note: you can mark individual bookmarks as public or private–be careful), and add me (username jwasserman) to your network. Let’s see how this works out.