Using del.icio.us as a real estate blogging tool

Posted by John Lockwood on May 27th, 2007

I’ve avoided using del.icio.us for a long time.  Actually I think more than anything I’ve avoided typing del.icio.us for a long time.  That’s got to be as ugly a word as you can think of to type.

There’s a trend in the Web 2.0 world toward ugly words.  It’s almost as though nothing happens at all if the word isn’t butt-ugly:  Blog.  del.icio.us. Mashup.

I mean:  who are we writing for?  Germans?  Why can’t our Web 2.0 words be prettier, like French words?  Je ne sais pourquoi pas!

Anyway, be not afraid.  For purposes of this article I’ve stuck del.icio.us into the clipboard.  Easy.

As much as I hate typing del.icio.us, I love using it, now that I’ve given it a spin.  I’m using it extensively to plan out and execute the work for my new map project blog, and after doing this, I’m not sure how I ever blogged without it!  The feature I like best for this purpose is the ability to subscribe to one or more tags.  In the case of the Sacramento Map Project, for example, I subscribe to “Sacramento”, “Maps”, Mashup”, “GPS” and the like, and every so often go into the subscription page to see what folks are linking to.

The next step is to view those pages, see if there’s anything cool to write about, and either go write about it now, or tag it for later.  A tag can be anything, of course, so for things I want to write about I use “Map_Todo” as a reminder to myself to write about it on my map blog.  I’ve already written one blog entry that I would never have even learned the background for if I hadn’t been digging further into categories.  There’s something about going after “tags” as opposed to keywords that seems to be more conducive to the creative process.  Conceptually they’re pretty similar, of course, so perhaps it’s just the fact that you’re statistically more likely to bump into something that other people have found interesting.

Next thing you know, you’ve got fifteen things to blog about and a bunch of bookmarks to remind you how to get back to those fifteen things.

What’s not to love?

By the way, if you want to check out my bookmarks, here’s where to go:  http://del.icio.us/JohnLockwood.