Despite the fact del.icio.us has been around for quite a while I really didn't fully understand its popularity. I saw del.icio.us as a facebook/myspace for bookmarks. This all changed when I started blogging.
I've always been a news hound and pour through tons of articles from a variety of sources covering dozens of subjects. After taking a closer look, I quickly found out that del.icio.us makes it easy to store them all in one place and, if tagged properly, access them from any computer in an organized and timely fashion as I needed them.
Another great benefit is that my friends could reference my profile and access the sites and articles I found interesting. There are many other uses, for example publishers can organize their sites' presentation and e-commerce sites can use tags to make it easier to find what consumers are searching for.
del.icio.us is also very useful to SEO. If you have a website, I would recommend that you noticeably display and encourage visitors to use del.icio.us throughout your site. By adding your content to their bookmarks and tagging them cleverly, you gain two strong advantages; one, it will increase the chances of a return visit and two, you'll benefit from the links.
Finally, social bookmarking isn't going away. Just this week word broke that Clipmarks has been acquired by Forbes.com. Mastering del.icio.us takes some time, but the rewards are huge. You're not limited to del.icio.us, there are a lot more social bookmarking sites out there. Furl, Simply, Ma.gnolia, StumbleUpon and IBM's new Dogear to name a few. Check 'em out, test the features, explore the technology and have fun too!
Tag, your it!