For a little while now, I have been posting “remaindered links” to the sidebar titled (for now) “Current Awareness”. These are just links with a brief comment from me about why I find them interesting. I’m putting them in that link blog rather than in the main See Also blog because I feel like the link is about all I have to offer; many times, I haven’t even read the entire page that I’m linking to yet. If I find that later I’m ready to comment at length, I’ll do another post here in See Also.

The Current Awareness sidebar is powered by del.icio.us the fantastic social bookmarking site. I have long felt that bookmarks in the browser aren’t all that useful; the list scrolls on too long, they aren’t easily searchable, etc. I had used my old blog to keep track of links, so when that server died last year and I was without my blog, I was casting about for a new place to put my links. Thanks to 43Folders, I found del.icio.us.

With del.icio.us bookmarklets, it is easy to post to my del.icio.us account, and thanks to the tags I give everything, it’s usually pretty easy to find what I want later. And the popular page, which shows the pages most posted by del.icio.us users, is now my web-zeitgeist-meter of choice; it skews heavily toward people interested in social software, web design, programming, and life hacks.

A few more reasons to love del.icio.us: the inbox that subscribes to other people’s posts based on the tags they give to the post, or based on who posted the link; meaningful URLS, i.e. if you want to see all links with the tag “library” the URL is http://del.icio.us/tag/library/; the abundance of tools written by del.icio.us users; the nifty linkroll javascript tool that powers my Current Awareness; and the RSS feed for every single page, so you can keep tabs on anything. If you want, you can subscribe to the feed for the See Also Current Awareness sidebar here.

Reasons not to love del.icio.us: my fingers and I always argue over where to put the dots: deli.cio.us? del.ici.ous? delic.io.us?