del.icio.us and social bookmarking

This is a dangerous exercise. Any time someone tells me to start looking up things on the internet that interest me, I go into a time-free zone where nothing else exists except, well, at the moment, going backpacking and fishing for trout in Washington's high lakes.

So... now that I've emerged from the wormhole, here are my thoughts:

del.icio.us is a useful tool if you want to be able to access your bookmarks from any computer with web access. Most of the time, I'm just messing around on the internet, so access to my "important" bookmarks isn't something I really need. However, if I were doing a lot of web-based research, I can see how this would be EXTREMEMLY USEFUL. I could find articles or blogs that address things I'm researching, get myself some feeds, and go to town. I imagine if you're doing academic work... and thus academic networking... that this would also be very useful as you could make connections with folks who are researching the things you're interested in.

I guess if I were more of a socialite, I could hook up with hiking or fishing buddies through the whole social bookmarking thing, but... well... I've kind of got some buddies already...

As far as usefulness in libraries is concerned, I think social bookmarking could be very useful in reference, especially from the tagging standpoint: the ability to search for bookmarks by keyword, especially if those bookmarks are compiled for their usefulness to library reference staff, could save lots of time and effort.