Recently, Del.icio.us advertised free goodies for anyone that sent in a stamped addressed envelope. So since I had a few spare US stamps lying around, I sent them a stamp and an envelope as I always love free stuff! This morning, it arrived!

My Executive Assistant, Scrat, offered to pose with one of the stickers and one of the bookmarks. When he isn't chasing nuts in Ice Age movies, Scrat helps me out at home. He's very good at answering the phone and making tea.

So there I was minding my own business, organising and cleaning out the tags in my del.icio.us account when suddenly the service went down with an "error 999" page. That was 2 hours ago and it still isn't back. To my mind, this is the first time that del.icio.us has crashed like this. Or am I wrong?

First Skype and now del.icio.us? What the hell is going on with the internet this week?

Del.icio.us is one of my favourite websites and I use it to tag sites every day. In fact, anyone that subscribes to this site's RSS feed also gets a copy of my tagged sites every day. So when I read today that they are planning to change the site, I became concerned.

Don't get me wrong - I am not averse to improvements and upgrades. But sometimes a website doesn't need to be changed. The Del.icio.us site works fine, it is stable, I have never seen it crash, it does what it promises - so why change it? What could the Del.icio.us team do to possibly improve on what is already there?

This is one of the unfortunate side-effects of Web 2.0. Website feel that in order to "stay in the game", they have to constantly modernise and upgrade their websites. If a rival goes all flashy then everyone else has to as well, lest they be accused of "lagging behind". Why can't people just recognise a winning formula and stick with it? Minimalism is good - just look at the Google website. They've hardly changed their design ever and look how successful they are.

Sometimes it isn't the design that counts but the service you offer your visitors. The rest is just meaningless window dressing.

I often get asked by friends and sometimes by strangers what my favourite pieces of software are and what my favourite webtools are. These days, there's so much to choose from online which means that personal recommendations are often best to separate the wheat from the chaff. People often gravitate to me for recommendations because I am ALWAYS testing new software and webtools. I am a complete sucker for gadgets and beta software. I love seeing what is around the corner, internet-wise. I love seeing the rapid advances being made. At the same time, I am also extremely fussy and my attention span is extremely short. So for something to survive on my computer, it has to be GOOD, it has to be USEFUL and it has to WORK. Nothing irritates me more than something that doesn't work (such as the Wordpress fiasco the other day). The program / tool must also help my productivity in some way and make my life better as a result.

I am going to start a little series of posts on what I consider to be "essential tools for your PC". Please note though that if anything goes wrong on your computer by trying these things out, I am not liable! It worked for me and I like it. That's the extent of any guarantees I am willing to offer!

OK, to start this little series off, I am going to start with Del.icio.us :

For those of you who are not aware, Del.icio.us is owned by Yahoo and it allows you to bookmark websites in an online central location (the Del.icio.us website). Whereas the late 1990's were all about information being stored on your computer (with programs such as Outlook Express), the new millenium is now focused on the much-overused phrase, "Web 2.0" - social networking websites, user-driven content and encouragement to move everything online (Google being a big proponent of this with their Gmail and Google Docs), the main benefit being that you can access your weblinks no matter where you are and what computer you are using. Del.icio.us covers all these areas. All bookmarks are stored on the Del.icio.us website, you can access them on any PC with an internet connection, and users can see how popular a link is by the number of people that have also linked to it. Users can link to one another so you can see any new links that the user posts and you can arrange your links in various ways (more on that later).

Del.icio.us offers various ways to post links, once you have created an account but I personally like the Firefox extension (although NOT the new one that automatically synchronises your browser bookmarks). If you have Firefox installed, then I can't recommend the "classic Del.icio.us extension" highly enough. It makes posting links an absolute breeze.

You can find old links later by tagging each one as you post them. So a bookselling post which deals with the business aspect of bookselling would get the tags "books" & "business". Or a Star Trek wikipedia site would get the tags "wiki", "reference", "star-trek", "sci-fi" and so on. When you want to find a link, you can just click on the relevant tag or you can use the Del.icio.us search engine. Be cautious though about how many new tags you invent though as your tag list can very quickly get cluttered. Only make very general tags which can be used for countless other posts. So make a "books" tag instead of a "Leo Tolstoy" tag for example. Every few months or so, it pays for you to do some spring cleaning and delete the tags that are no longer needed.

As well as cleaning out your tags every now and then, you can also make your tags even neater by bundling them into categories. So all your history-related tags can go into a "history" category for example. This is something I have only just started doing myself as it is quite time-consuming!

One of the things I REALLY like about Del.icio.us is that other sites such as Feedburner offer blog owners the ability to have their newly posted Del.icio.us links added to the blog's RSS feed every day. So if you were to subscribe to my RSS feed then every day, you would get an extra post in your RSS reader with all the new del.icio.us links that I have posted in the past 24 hours. Del.icio.us also offers some services for bloggers and webmasters which enables you to publicise your links.

You could probably work out more just by viewing my del.icio.us page itself. It's all fairly self-explanatory. Oh and feel free to add me to your network. I post nearly every day. After a while, posting all your links to Del.icio.us becomes second nature and dare I say it, slightly addictive?

How do you use Del.icio.us? Do you have any tips about how to use the service better? Leave your views in the comments section!

The next entry in "Essential Internet Tools" will be tomorrow. Subscribe to my RSS feed so you don't miss it!

I've been reading a fascinating post on the Micro Persuasion blog about using Gmail to set up your own "personal nerve center". Reading this makes me realise the ever-expanding uses for Gmail and other Google applications.

I particularly like the Twitter one where you can get BBC and CNN headlines sent directly to your Google Talk application which is embedded inside Gmail. I am a big news junkie and I have been subscribed to CNN's Breaking News email service for many years now. But if this Twitter / Google Talk thing really starts working without any hitches, I may consider ditching the email service. The cool part is that when a news headline arrives in your Google Talk app, Gmail automatically files it away in your Gmail archive where it can be found and retrieved later.

The other interesting part of the post is having your del.icio.us links and Google Reader "shared links" sent to your email every day for filing. Since I am a big user of both services, this will prove quite useful.

The post has also got me considering the possibility of applying for Google Apps. The lure for me would be the 10GB of email space. But at $50 a year, I think I would probably wait until I see how fast I am going to use up the free 2GB that Gmail already gives users. After 3 years and 5500 emails, I am only at 13% of the storage space.