How I do my own Data Mining - Delicious

What is Delicious

I've been using Delicious for last few years. For starters, Delicious is an online service for social bookmarking. I believe Delicious and Digg were the first few "online social services" to gain mass momentum. Delicious has been acquired by Yahoo sometimes ago. However, it looks like it's on the verge of closing down or moving to a new company.

How Delicious Work

Any good article I read on the Internet, I try to bookmark on Delicious with tags that I think are appropriate. Delicious makes it very easy to search or navigate through the tags.

Besides tags, a bookmark can have Title (which Delicious sometimes auto-populates), and also a place to store personal Notes. I generally copy-paste salient details from the article into the Notes. One can make the bookmark private, share with few people, or share with everyone. Most of my earlier bookmarks were public, now they are mostly private. I don't necessarily want people to know everything I read and note on Internet. So far I have 1,000 plus bookmarks on Delicious having plethora of topics including Technology, Business, Programing, Education, Kids, Health, etc.

Delicious as Personal Data Warehouse

I often refer to these bookmarks when I blog on a subject. They generally work as my personal Datawarehouse. In fact after I get to collect a few bookmarks on a specific topic, it often leads to a blog. This phenomenon is very predictable, I bookmark articles that I like, then mind takes a few days to synthesize them; if they start to make sense and I have time at my disposal I convert them to a blog. Sounds simple :)

What I have Collected so far
I believe the first page I visit in morning is wsj.com. Naturally I have the most of the articles from this site. Here is a screenshot of my top tags: