This post came about after a short Twitter exchange with DeWitt Clinton (he’s @dewitt on Twitter). He asked:

Where do you find new interesting sites/memes *before* they hit digg, popurls, techmeme, reddit, etc? The more tech flavored the better.

I answered that I have a great network on delicious.com that provides me with that kind of thing. His reply got me thinking:

I’ve been treating delicious as write-only for years

This is exactly why del.icio.us is so powerful - the data that people enter is for their own use!

Delicious Is Anti-Social Bookmarking

We delicious users all store bookmarks (and colour palettes) for our own reference. Unlike Digg, Mixx, Reddit et al we’re not adding bookmarks to send traffic or become a top user or hit the front page or stimulate discussion. There’s little SEO, marketing or self-promotional value to being a popular delicious user (the front page sends a lot of traffic but that’s not the same as being a popular user).

We are being selfish and it’s powerful.

It’s powerful because it’s also open. If can identify a thought-leader in a given and he has a delicious account, I can see which sites he thinks are important enough to save for later reference.

This is very similar to my twitter philosophy of “follow interesting people” (stolen, I think, from Robert Scoble).

How To Build Your Delicious Network

I’ve got around forty people in my network right now, each one is active and interesting so I get about thirty to fifty interesting new links sent to me every day. Here’s how I found those people:

1. Pick subjects of interest - check your top ten tags if you’re not sure
2. Find out who the thought leaders are in each area. You probably know who they are already, but you can always find more. Use tools like:
   • Google blog search
   • Twitter - search for hashtags and just ask people
   • FriendFeed
   • Academic papers
3. You’ll find that a lot of people use the same username on all their Web 2.0 sites so check if they have a delicious account
4. If their delicious username isn’t obvious, try FriendFeed. That has links to a person’s delicious account under their list of services
5. Check their blog - lots of people automatically post their bookmarks every week using a Wordpress plugin
6. Try SocialWhoIs
7. When you have found their delicious profile, click the “Add to my network” link and then click “Yes” to confirm - I always forget to confirm

Build up a good sized network and check back periodically for new links (the Delicious Firefox plugin will highlight the network icon in the status bar if you have unread links in your network).

Enjoy - if you have geeky interests you can find my delicious profile here but only add me if you find my links interesting!

Creative Commons licensed photo by Thomas R. Stegelmann.