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I never really tried to store links to interesting websites as bookmarks in my browser for a longer period of time, as I have switched computers, operating systems and browsers too often. Furthermore, hard drive head crashs and other accidents happened as well. If I had to find anything useful, which I already found once in the past, I just did a Google search and sooner or later found the particular link again.

I quite often share useful links with friends and family (Hi Dad, hi Philipp ). So what I did, was mostly to send the particular link via email, instant messaging (ICQ, MSN, Skype…), direct conversation or “Send Link to Friend” functionality, which is integrated in many websites these days. But although this worked quite ok, it is not very fast forward, as you have to open the particular application, search your contact and send the link. Furthermore, if you already are sending that link to someone else, you probably want to bookmark it for yourself as well.

So, the following requirements arise:

way of sharing, that do not bother (e.g. if I send you 10 mails, each containing one link, you probably ask me to stop spamming )

This article explains a solution combining Del.icio.us, Google Reader and Firefox.

Del.icio.us is a so called social bookmarking site. After creating an account, you can add links to your bookmark list. Though you can assign as many tags as you like for each of your bookmarks to organize them and to be able to easily search for specific content.
All bookmarks, which are not explicitly set as private, can be seen by users and visitors of the del.icio.us website as well. That lets you not only save your own bookmarks, but browse bookmarks of other users and lets you discover new stuff, in which you might be interested.
Furthermore you can explicitly share certain bookmarks with other users. You only have to add these users to your network. If you afterwards bookmark a link, you can assign a special tag to it, to share that link with the selected user. This user sees the link automatically in the “links for you” section on the del.icio.us website.
To get notified about links others share with you, a RSS feed is provided. Here comes Google Reader into play. Just add the RSS feed and as soon as someone wants to send you a link, he just has to assign your tag to it and you can see the link in Google Reader automatically.

The following howto sets up such a scenario for user Alice and Bob (aka user A and B ). Just click on the first image to start:

Bookmarking and Bookmark Sharing with Del.icio.us, Google Reader and Firefox

If you like to share links with me, feel free to add me to your network. My del.icio.us user is: cb2206.