Part of the Blogger's Search series, the first in that series.
Delicious is a social bookmarking tool. It was developed by Josh Schacter and now is owned by Yahoo. On a typical Wednesday morning (Eastern Time) people are collectively bookmarking about 300 pages per minute. My own delicious collection is more than 10000 pages collected over almost 5 years, which puts me at some extreme edge of that network's user population.
To illustrate the applicability of delicious to the problem of searching for an expert, let me introduce you to several paths towards locating experts, enthusiasts, and key words to help you dig deeper into a subject using delicious as your first search engine before Google.
Expert location
Let's think that you are searching for information about restaurants in Montreal, and want to find someone who has expertise. A simple approach is to do a delicious tag combination and search for both tags simultaneously as montreal+restauarant and see what the stream of news is and who is writing and commenting. Vary your word use (restaurant, restaurants) as needed to get a wider stream.
Note that this gives you very, very different search results than a Google search for the same terms. Use this knowledge to refine your efforts; pick the first item from the Google list, bookmark it, and see who else has said what else about it. The quick check from that list of related tags is that "food" is much more popular than "restaurant" and "restaurants" (60 vs 40 or so) and so that's a next iteration for exploration of terms; any of the people who bookmarked this page are worth exploring further their tag streams to see what else they know or follow.
Enthusiast location
One typical characteristic of an enthusiastic user of delicious is that they will have many, many pages bookmarked using the same tag. If you go to someone's user page and they have 70, 100, or 150 different pages bookmarked with a single tag, chances are good that they are have some core expertise within that tag.
We'll take as our example a search for someone who has lot of interest in Orlando. Start on the list of popular Orlando pages ; there are only two of them, and one is the home page of the Orlando Sentinel. Look at the log of comments for that site and note the notes only page. In reading the comments one sticks out, from uni84freak : "Best source for Orlando theme park news". See their user page, and note that a top tag for them is Orlando with 24 bookmarks using that term; that's as good a start as any to explore one person's research.
Keyword research
This is not so much about finding the most popular terms, but rather identifying some very specific language and terms of art that experts use within a field. You are looking to do tag surfing, going from one term to another and then to a third to triangulate in on some topic where you have general knowledge but not specific enough. Here's a strategy:
Start with a term that you want to know more about: expert. Note that the related terms (finance, opinion, money) are wrong for this effort, so we go to popular pages on the subject, and get this result for the top page. That site's top tags are reference, search, information, howto and research - and we can move into each of those terms to narrow down what those are.
(more - still not complete - needs illustrations)
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This was posted when it was incomplete; that forced me to complete it. this one is hard to do. "triangulation" is the method I'm after but how to describe that without some graphs...
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