When it comes to business, there are thousands of entities which would be happy to take your cash in order to provide you with consulting services, analytical services, informational services, etc. The alternative is finding free tools on the internet that you can use to your advantage. One such resource is del.icio.us.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others. What makes del.icio.us a social system is its ability to let you see the links that others have collected, as well as showing you who else has bookmarked a specific site. You can also view the links collected by others, and subscribe to the links of people whose lists you find interesting.

So, basically del.icio.us is a collection of bookmarks which other users have saved to their profiles. All bookmarks are public, and organized by tag. This is the interesting part. Tags are one-word descriptors that one adds to their bookmarks. For example, if I found a website about buying Yahoo domains, I could save that in my del.icio.us profile and tag it with the word “domain”. Alternately, if I am really interested in Yahoo, I could tag it with both “yahoo” and “domain”. Aside from that link showing up in my personal profile under those tags, they are also now available to anyone who looks up the tag on del.icio.us.

Say I want to find out about marketing. I can hit Google and try typing in the word marketing with a bunch of other terms, and then dig through the results. It sounds like a reasonable way to do it, but I would much prefer using del.icio.us to look up the marketing tag. This is because I know that the links that del.icio.us gives me are those that others found useful. The formula for looking up a tag on del.icio.us is “del.icio.us/tag/PutTermHere”. So if I wanted to look up bookmarks that users put into the marketing tag, I would point my browser to http://del.icio.us/tag/marketing. Give the link a click and see what you come up with. If you want to look up AdSense resources, you would look at http://del.icio.us/tag/adsense.

This is a case where you have the community working together to find the cream of the crop on the internet. Check out del.icio.us the next time you want information on any subject at all. Let us know what gems you find.