Del.icio.us links on Promote the Progress - sharing links to highlight intellectual property issues

I’ve added a sidebar that includes a subset of my del.icio.us links.  What’s del.icio.us, you ask?  Well, when I asked Nipper, he quipped simply “Social Bookmarking”  (I’m pretty sure he included the capital S and capital B in his response).  Ok, so the next question is “what is ‘social bookmarking?’”

My simple explanation: social bookmarking is the sharing of bookmarks.  Del.icio.us is a tool that enables people to share their bookmarks.  I collect my bookmarks here, assigning tags to each bookmark I add.  People can see my bookmarks on my del.icio.us site.

But here’s the really cool part.  Del.icio.us gives you an easy way to share your collected links on a particular topic.  For example, I had a conversation with my local barista yesterday over a cup o’ joe.  We’re both aquarists, so our conversation turned to interesting things like refugiums, plumbing, and light cycles.  I’m preparing to start a new reef tank, and the barista was offering tips and tricks from his 40+ years of experience with saltwater tanks.  He wrote down several URLs, but cautioned me that he wasn’t sure if they were correct — he was going from memory (he hadn’t reached his optimum level of caffeine for the day yet).

Wouldn’t it have been cool if he could have pointed me to an easy to remember URL that contains all of his aquarium related links?

Enter del.icio.us.  Once you create an account, you get a cool URL that contains every link you add.  My newly established collection is located at http://del.icio.us/jmbesq.  A subURL is created for each tag.  I’ll soon be adding a tag for aquarium-related links to share with the barista.

For PTP, I am tagging links I find related to intellectual property issues.  The sidebar on the main PTP page pulls in recent links related to a particular tag, which I change from time to time.  This enables me to highlight recent links I’ve added that relate to a particular topic.  I have started with the Embedded Patent Attorney, which has been a hot topic of late.

And every user and tag has an RSS feed to boot.  Wow.

I’ll change the topic occasionally, highlithing an IP issue of interest.  Feel free to suggest topics by sending me e-mail.

Thanks to Sorocco for nagging me (ok, we’ll call it ‘convincing me’) to learn and use del.icio.us.