Let me tell you about a way to store those juicy parts of the web you visit, for future reference.

The truth is the web is crawling with wonderful ideas and enlightening media. Often you will want to be able to find that cool website you visited, with all the great cooking tips, or that blog where you heard how life expectancy in the US is about to lower for the current generation of kids. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a way to explore this extended knowledge, and have all the worthwhile material you’ve seen online easily browsable and reachable? No more asking the question “Where did I read about that again?”

Well, there’s a simple way. And it’s delicious.

Not literally, of course. Delicious is a web tool that allows you to catalogue, or bookmark, pages or sites you find interesting on the web. And because that information is stored on the cloud, ie on a computer that is permanently accessible, you don’t have to worry with losing it.

It comes with a very handy firefox add-on too. Here’s how I use it.

Whenever I find something I want to keep for future reference, say a website where you can rate films, and get recommendations based on other users opinions, that match your taste, I tag it. Ctrl+D or clicking the icon next to the address bar will do the trick. Then I add tags to that page accordingly. Choosing tags that are not too general (art, information) nor too specific (documentary film, Kubrick) helps keeping the list manageable and the information findable. And as with everything in life (except backups – sorry for the geeky pun), I try  to stay away from redundancy.

I usually wrap up by adding some content from the site, that serves as a general description of it. More often than not from the About page. There is a ‘Note’ field for that.

Afterwards, when the pages are nicely stored, there are two ways of retrieving them. You can peruse the tag list, or you can search by keyword. Ctrl+B or clicking the ‘Bookmarks’ icon will open your bookmarks.

Of course, over the passing of the years, your interests become reflected on the ways you explore the web. And thus on your delicious tags. I find this idea quite tantalizing, but I acknowledge that to some it might seem like an exposure of one’s privacy. Granted. And that’s why you can tag your bookmarks as private, and thus only you will have access to them.

One last tip before I expose a slice of my personality. Build a social network of real friends that use delicious too, and you have yourself a great way of sharing bookmarks. Share your views, and ideally your web-footprint in the comment section, will ya?

(tag cloud created from my delicious account, using the magnificent webservice Wordle.net)