First, there's personal organization. I could never get the
hang of bookmarks and folders, and it was hard to remember what to
search for.

Then there's social discovery. I check my del.icio.us once in a
while in order to find out what the latest bookmarks are in a certain
area, although I'm now slightly annoyed about the fact that most
bookmarks are either stuff I've already seen or stuff I don't care
about.

So that's not what I really like, either.

I somewhat like using del.icio.us to share URLs, but those tend to be
special-purpose tags we've agreed on beforehand. I don't really tell
people to check out my http://del.icio.us/sachac/social links, for
example, because there are just too many links for people to sort
through properly. It's the problem of navigating through someone
else's personal information space.

Social search a la http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com isn't that big for
me either because (a) I'm not connected enough to get much better
search results, and (b) I don't trust that all the relevant sites have
been bookmarked, so I may as well go through a regular search engine.

Hmmm.

On the other hand, using event- (http://del.icio.us/tag/torcamp) or
issue-oriented tags like digitalpinay
(http://del.icio.us/tag/digitalpinay) made it easy to quickly gather
bookmarks without having to set up some kind of groupblog or wiki.

And I totally, totally, totally love checking out people's bookmarks
and getting an idea of their interests.

Totally.

That's my killer app for del.icio.us. Stalking. ;) No, no, it's called
keeping up with old friends and making new ones.

And that's why people check out my bookmarks,
too. Okay, well, they don't really have a choice because
I include my bookmarks in my blog feed for my tech-savvy friends who
read lots of blogs, so other geeks can't help but notice whenever I
bookmark tango websites and whatnot.

I wonder if there's a business use for this, like the way I would
_really_ like being able to flip through other people's
bibliographies. Stuff like that.

I CAN DO THIS. I just have to make sure that it's not a solution in
search of a problem! <laugh>

See, PhD students can spend time figuring out what the problem is and
then thinking up a solution. What's a master's student supposed to do?