This post is the first in a series: Part 2: What makes del.icio.us a "social" bookmarking tool?, Part 3: What is del.icio.us?.

One of the tools I mention often in my presentations is del.icio.us – a social bookmarking tool. I thought that it might be worth providing an overview of del.icio.us, what it does and why I think it’s useful, for those folks that may be unfamiliar with the tool.

del.icio.us is a free service from Yahoo! that makes it easy to save your bookmarks online. Once in del.icio.us, you can access them from any computer that is connected to the web. If you work on multiple computers (say, one at work and one at home), this can be very helpful. (Don’t worry if you can’t work out that funky address, delicious.com will get you there just fine.)

Once you’ve created an account on the site, there are a couple of ways to bookmark a site. Perhaps the simplest way to get started is to use what’s called a "bookmarklet" – which is a special link that you drag to your browser’s bookmark toolbar – to bookmark a site with one click (more information on del.icio.us’ bookmarklets can be found on this help page).

Alternatively, if you are using the Firefox web browser, you can use one of two extensions to integrate del.icio.us into the browser – one from Yahoo! that replaces Firefox’s bookmarking system with del.icio.us integration, another that extends (rather than replaces) Firefox’s standard bookmarks facility.

When you add a site to del.icio.us you can label the bookmark with a number of "tags". Tags, if you’re not familiar with them, are short text descriptions (similar to keywords) that you can use to categorise your links with. Rather than a fixed and formal set of categories, you can tag a link with as many free-form tags as you like – just use as many tags to describe the link as required.

Tags in delicious are single words separated by spaces. So if you wanted to tag something with multiple words, say "social media", you would tag it "socialmedia".

As you add more links, you will naturally get more and more tags. del.icio.us allows you to then view all of your links by tag, or search them. This makes it easier to find tags in the future – rather than having to remember exactly where you saved the link (in one specific folder for example), you can look through any number of relevant tags, or use the search function.

A week and a bit ago I had the good fortune to attend the Web Standards Group meetup with guest speakers Richard Ishida and José Manuel Alonso, both from the W3C.

Over the jump are my notes from the session…

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The folks at Freshview have introduced yet another great feature to Campaign Monitor, their web-based email management system: Automatic inline CSS styles.

While there are tools out there that do this (most of which I found out about through the Campaign Monitor blog), having this functionality embedded within the tool itself makes it even easier.

While this probably only means something to developers, it actually will save clients a lot of money too – developers have to spend a lot of time maintaining and updating newsletter templates to get them working right in various email clients. This “one click” solution will make that whole process a lot easier.

Freshview have announced a new feature that allows you to compare the performance indicators (open, bounce, click rates) across a number of campaigns.

I can see this feature being immensely useful for anyone that is using the tool. Previously I’ve had to pull together various reports in a spreadsheet to get nice graphs comparing performance over time etc. and this makes it a lot easier.

I also dig Mathew’s suggestion of doing A/B comparison of different subject lines etc. A great way to tweak the performance of your campaigns.

Ning have posted an interview with Joshua Forgotson, who created a social network on Ning for Earth Day. He talks about a few of the features they used in the network. It’s a useful introduction to some of Ning’s features. (Hat tip: DamianM via IM)

I’ve been a long time user of NetNewsWire for Mac OS X, an RSS news reader that allows me to track over 100 blogs and news sources from one application.

I’ve been a happy customer for some time and gladly paid the admission price some time ago and for the recent 3.0 upgrade. Brent Simmons NNW‘s developer, announced today that as of version 3.1, NNW is now free.

For those of you that haven’t used NNW before because it was pay-ware, I’d definitely recommend checking it out – it’s extremely powerful and great to use, integrates well with del.icio.us and other blog editors, and is just plain useful.