Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others intere

Delicious was one of the best resources for finding articles on niche interests, for surfacing articles that were especially good, and for finding others interested in the same topics as you. As for two specific examples: Learning Ruby on Rails has been a long, slow, struggle for me. A number of reasons for that, but one of the main ones being that I don't have many other programmers in my area that I can talk about it with. Although there are scores of blogs and tutorials on Rails, it's hard to know which articles are good, and nobody has the time to read them all. So if I was looking for a post on, say, integrating jQuery with Rails, I could do a quick search at http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery http://www.delicious.com/tag/rails+jquery, and I'd find a bunch of articles that had been selected by individuals, for their own use. It was great for finding high-quality content. Another example deals with niche interests. Delicious made it easy to suss out who is talking about $randominterest. Just by going to http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest http://delicious.com/tag/randominterest, you can see who else is bookmarking it, who's writing about it, and so on. Especially when dealing with, say, fringe programming languages, or uncommon design details, Delicious makes it easy to find people.