Bookmarks used to be a key part of Web browsing. Before the advent of good search engines, a bookmark let you keep valuable sites in an easily accessible place, and my own bookmark list quickly grew beyond my ability to manage it. Various bookmark tools came to the rescue, but I gradually stopped using them in favor of straight Web searches.

Even so, it's intriguing to watch the innovation in this small area of Web interaction. For bookmarks have become exchangeable, with users sharing their lists in interesting ways, and their collections of links have moved outside the browser itself and onto specific Web services.

The one that stands out at present is del.icio.us. And yes, that's written correctly -- it's an address. Typed exactly as shown into your Web browser, it will bring up a page full of bookmarks the site's users have found valuable and thought to share. By itself, this list on the del.icio.us main page is of no more than mild interest, but register for a free account and things begin to happen.

Del.icio.us can set up "bookmarklets" on your browser's toolbar (you can use any of the major browsers -- I set mine up with Firefox). A bookmarklet is just a button you click to add whatever site you're currently looking at to the del.icio.us service. A screen then appears giving you the ability to provide additional information, such as a short comment about the site and, most important, a set of one-word "tags" that identify the kind of content therein.

These tags are useful descriptors because they make your growing list of bookmarks readily searchable. Instead of a nested set of folders, in which you have to place each site you've bookmarked (and then have to remember where you put it), tags let you go quickly to the bookmark you want. You can add as many tags as you choose, edit them, merge them, delete them, and search all of del.icio.us with them.

Say I choose the tags "medieval" and "history" to flag a site about the Crusades. I can recover my bookmark easily by searching on that term, but more powerfully, I can also search the entire set of bookmarks accumulated by del.icio.us users for anything with similar tags. I then get a list of bookmarked sites, many of which are unfamiliar to me but can be valuable in my studies.

What del.icio.us is doing by tagging information is allowing us to take advantage of the accumulated work of a community. Here's another way to use it: go to a Web site of interest and click on the "bookmarks from others" button that del.icio.us creates in your browser toolbar. You'll then see a list of all those who have bookmarked this site.

Why is this useful? Because when you consult that list, you also see the tags these people have used and can access their complete bookmark list. If someone is interested in the same site you are, they may well have discovered things you haven't. So you can move through the information by personal bookmark list as well as by searching for tags.

Helpfully, del.icio.us makes it easy to see which tags are associated with a given site and often suggests in doing so a new way to search the database for information.

On top of this, I'm seeing a large number of add-on programs to improve using the site, an indication of how vibrant the concept has become.

Bookmark tools go a long way beyond providing access to you from any Net-connected computer, though that is one of their benefits. By moving bookmarks into a public Web space, these services unlock linkages to information that a standard Web search might bury deep within pages of search results -- which is reason enough to give del.icio.us a look.

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