Researching with Social Bookmarks

I'm enamored with the new concept of social bookmarking, and in particular, the website Del.icio.us. The basic points of usefulness are straight forward: house your bookmarks online so you can access them from any computer; share them with friends -- even subcategories such as http://del.icio.us/apckrd/social_bookmark. You can even subscribe to each others' bookmarks, and see them trickling in as an RSS feed. (What team working on a project impacted by information couldn't use an automated means of flagging new content and sharing, and amassing a searchable library?)
However, I've had a challenging time consistently conveying to friends something I find most useful of all: using Del.icio.us to quickly find new, odd-ball sites (call it "researching new sites"). I thought I'd dedicate this post to a "How To" explanation.
If you already know Del.icio.us, skip to #3 below.
Otherwise, if "Social Bookmarking" is still new to you, here's a high-level video...

In a nutshell:

1. Del.icio.us is a place where users post URLs and write tags for them. (URL: CNN.com. Tags: News, Time_Warner, Int'l_News)
2. Just like you Google "International news" and get pages, you can search through Del.icio.us BOOKMARKS for the tag "International News" - that is, you are searching through websites other Del.icio.us users have manually tagged as "International News" (which will get you some sites that don't call themselves either word - International or News - but for some reason the user thinks of them as this)
3. If you find a website you love and want to find more like it - see what other people tagged it as, and then view what OTHER sites they gave the same tag to

This #3 above is the real gem. Here's an example:

1. You find a website you love: SpringWidgets
2. You'd love to find other sites like this, but you don't even really know what to call this site. (You Google "widgets" but that doesn't get you a simple list of sites like this one.)
3. You go to Del.icio.us, and you DON'T search for "widgets" (you can, but check this out...). You search for "www.SpringWidgets.com"
4. This gets you a list of pages within the site people tagged
   
• Currently, there are only 2 pages within SpringWidgets that have been tagged by anyone
  
• Currently, 940 people have the homepage tagged. THIS is the crazy, useful spot...Click where it says " saved by 940 people"
  
5. There, you will see:
• A list of the comments each user gave this URL (down the main page). This helps you understand what people appreciate about this site, what it means to them
  
• BEST: Down the right side of the page, you see a list of user names and the tag they gave it. Click on that tag (for one person) and see what OTHER websites they gave the same tag to. The beauty of this is that some people use very simple tags ("widget") and others craft tags that may be more telling. I tagged this "widget-pantry" which is kind of silly, but I was looking for sites that offer lots of widgets. I have a few other sites also tagged "widget-pantry."
  

This is how you discover other websites like this one.
This is how you research websites using Del.icio.us.
Once you do this a few times, you develop an eye for other users who are more useful to you - who have sites you know and love tagged with tags that make sense to you. Add them to your network, and watch what new sites they discover. Here are the folks in my network: http://del.icio.us/network/apckrd (note: YOU can even subscribe to new bookmarks from the people in MY network - wacky, eh?)