Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking system that allows you to save sites you bookmark to a centralized site where you can tag and organize them.  If you choose to leave them public,which they are set to be default, other people can search them, explore them and discover other sites they were unaware of.

Unlike Digg, people do not vote on the popularity of a link, they simply keep saving it, and the more saves it has, the more chance of traffic being driven to that site.  While it is an exciting way for typical users to find new links, it can be a boon in traffic to site owners that get a lot of links shared on the service.

This definitely falls under the cloud computing idea we discussed, and as we said, you should never rely on your data being safe without a back up.  Luckily you can download your bookmarks to save on your local browser, and you can also upload the ones on your computer to their system, and in that case those will be marked private by default.  This will also give you access to your bookmarks from any computer by simply logging into the del.icio.us site.

It’s a completely different way to use bookmarks from the old way, and may be worth at least a little exporation on your part.