For a while last year it looked like we might lose  Delicious, the King of online bookmarking and my favorite curation tool, as owner Yahoo did some strategic re-arranging.  Delicious was bought by the founders of Youtube and is now rocking on as good as ever.

So what is Delicious?

Think about how you arrange files on your computer:  perhaps that MS Word document is filed in a sub-sub directory of my documents like  C:\….\MyDocuments\business\correspondence\john_smith_ltr.doc.  Delicious allows you to organize Internet content in the same way.   If you find a blog post you want to save, you simply paste the link into delicious, assign one or more keywords and the article is saved to a specific URL – for example:  http://delicious.com/joespake/socialmedia/  will take you to the articles I think are interesting enough to save.  There are lots of possibilities for sharing with this simple format, and as a bonus, Delicious lets you generate an RSS feed for the sub-directory.  Wanna subscribe to my social media saves? just go to http://www.delicious.com/v2/rss/joespake/socialmedia.   Watch this screencast to see how easy Delicious is to use.

And what does curation do for me?

Having significant information at your fingertips is important if you blog, speak, or are in any situation where you would want to share information.  You can use your curated items to archive your great work or the great work of others, and you can use the keywords to drill down to the most specific levels.  If you are selling Xwidgets as part of your inventory, you might have a keyword for Xwidgets where you curate the latest and greatest articles from the Web on that topic.  You could just forward the link (like my link above) to get your customer up to date and establish yourself as an expert.