Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

For months my friend Nanda has been trying to get me to join a social bookmarking site. This particular one is devoted to shopping on the web. I had offered to just send her my amazon wishlist, but she insisted on having choices and the ease of buying them in between billing and talking to patrons. I wasn't crazy about the idea and ignored the repeated email requests she had sent to my inbox. I'm not saying I spend my whole day working, but I try to curtail my online wanderings and mostly keep to related sites. Bookmarking sites with desired objects seemed like a good way to get started on wasting a lot of time. But when I was asked to look into social bookmarking as a class assignment. It was the first thing I thought of. Of course, now my friend is out of town and I can't do that, so I explored other options for social bookmarking.

I opened my del.icio.us account and installed the icons on my browser. Then I headed into my workday as normal bookmarking an tagging where I might normally bookmark on my browser. While I still doubt I will use this at home, I realized that I do have several folders on my browsers bookmarks tab. I also had a folder of articles, mostly online for a project that I am working on with a few other colleagues. It occurred to me that YES social bookmarking could be useful for research. All these articles that had been printed, copied or sent by email could be collected into one site for use by all of us. Which I did. Then I went to get my colleagues set up on del.icio.us. Now instead of searching through all my literature by hand while working on a certain area of the project or trying to remember what article talked about 'that topic' I can use the tagging system we'd already developed(we are librarians) and search for the topic we were currently working on. Presto! The articles we need to reference for this section there. New articles could be added and we could all reach them even if at home, in the hospital, or in another office.(all possible scenarios for our group) It has made the collaboration and compiling of research and writing just that much easier!