With the increasing attention I've been giving our Social Signal Twitter account, I've found myself in a bit of dilemma. Tweeting web links is one of the simplest and most effective ways to offer regular, useful info of value to your followers. But the links that would be most useful to SoSi followers are the very links I need to keep track of myself -- for which I rely on delicious.

In principle, there are lots of ways I could integrate the two services. But I have several criteria:

1. My links need to be posted to Twitter with a shortened URL (like a bit.ly URL) so the link itself doesn't use up all 140 characters Twitter lets me tweet. (This in spite of delicious founder Josh Schacter's well-articulated concerns about URL shorteners.)
2. My links need to be posted to delicious with the full URL, not just the shortened version.
3. My links need to be posted to delicious with appropriate tags at the time I post the URL, rather than lying in wait for me to visit delicious and add tags at a later date.
4. I want to control what gets tweeted, and not just have it twitter that I bookmarked a URL.

I've found several good options. There are pros and cons to each:

delicious tag + TwitterFeed

TwitterFeed is a service that will read an RSS feed and automatically post each item to Twitter; you can use it to parse the outbound RSS feed for a particular tag and a particular user. When I find a link I want to tweet, I post it to delicious. Then I add the tag "tweetthis" on top of any other tags I'm using. I've set up TwitterFeed to parse the RSS feed for every bookmark I tag with "tweetthis"

PROS:

• I get to use my usual approach for posting items to delicious -- whether from Firefox, Safari or iPhone -- and assign the tags I want to use.
• TwitterFeed lets me choose my preferred URL shortener (bit.ly) from a long list of options.
• Can post links from my delicious account, Rob's, or anyone else's.
• Great if you're a religious delicious-er like me, and want to twitter more (for virtually no more effort!)

CONS:

• I have to keep an eye on my description field in delicious and watch the total number of characters so Twitter doesn't cut off my description when it pulls in the link.
• Need to aggregate both "tweetthis" and "tweethis" to deal wth my frequent typos.

firestatus

Firestatus is a FireFox add-on that lets me post something to Twitter and delicious simultaneously. It puts a little icon in the bar at the bottom of my FF window. Clicking on the icon brings up a slender bar with a text entry field for my Twitter status line, and a second entry field for the tags I want to use in storing the item in delicious.

PROS:

• A very lightweight, elegant interface with bonus options like a built-in spell checker and the option of also posting to Facebook (my tweets already cross-post to Facebook, but for some folks that would be useful).
• I get to choose my tags.
• Control over how often it updates to each site.
• Great if want some of your tweeted links cross-posted to delicious, but not all of them.

CONS:

• I have to use Firefox for anything I want to bookmark.
• Need to decide that I want to post to both Twitter and delicious at time of creation.
• Teensy weensy icon in the bottom bar is SO discreet it's a bit hard to spot.

tweecious

Tweecious is a Firefox add-on that parses my Twitter feed and looks for tweets that include a link. When it finds a tweet that included a link, it adds that link to my delicious bookmarks, and uses my tweet as the description field. Then it uses Zemanta -- another of my new favourite toys -- to choose tags for the bookmark.

PROS:

• Includes the URL of the original tweet in the delicious description field, so you remember you've already twittered it!
• Offers option to parse your last 1000 tweets -- so any links you've already tweeted will get added to delicious.
• While it installs as part of Firefox, it will parse Tweets that come from anywhere, so I can use my usual combo of Tweetdeck-Tweetie-HootSuite.
• Stores the full-length URL on delicious by using LongURL to unpack the URL generated by whichever shortener I've used. Access to Tweecious preferences appears when you visit delicious -- smart and seamless.
• Smart enough to figure out all my account ids on its own, but doesn't store passwords itself.
• Extreme coolness -- not to mention efficiency -- of automatically tagging links.
• Easy to see bookmarks added this way in delicious because they are all tagged tweecious.

CONS:

• No immediate, direct control over the tags that get assigned to a bookmark.
• Limited to a single account -- so I have to decide whether to tweecious my personal @awsamuel twitter account or tweecious our @socialsignal company account. (It's possible I could work around this by setting up an @socialsignal(twitter)-to-awsamuel(delicious) instance of tweetie on Firefox running on another computer.)
• Delicious will consider the date of bookmark creation to be the date on which it was imported by tweecious; would be great if it assigned date based on date of your tweet.
• If you're not a Zemanta user, your delicious bookmarks will only be tagged "tweecious".

Potential cluttering of my delicious account with links I'm twittering links but don't particularly want to bookmark (for example, all the Social Signal blog posts we twitter on release -- then again, that could be a pro, since it's probably great for our visibility & SEO).

The verdict

I'm just getting going with these three approaches, so time will tell. But for now, I see them as complementary:

• If I'm adding a bookmark in delicious, and it suddenly occurs to me that I'd also like to tweet it, I'll just add the tweetthis tag. If I'm revisiting a bookmark, and it now seems Twitter-worthy, I'll add the tweetthis tag then.
• If I'm about to Twitter a link while in FireFox, and I know I want to store it on delicious in a way that will ensure I can find it when I want to (i.e. I want to ensure it has particular tags attached) I'll use FireStatus.
• If I Twitter a link without thinking about delicious, it will end up in delicious anyhow thanks to Tweecious.

What does this mean for you? Well, you can use some or all of these same tools to boost your tweeting with high-value links -- or to ensure all the links you're already twittering now are readily retrievable on delicious.

Or you can just let us find all your key links for you. With these three tools at our disposal, Social Signal's tweets and delicious links will be more useful than ever.

Related articles from other sites

• Tweecious turns Twittered links into Delicious bookmarks (news.cnet.com)
• Head-to-Head: TweetDeck vs Seesmic Desktop (mashable.com)
• How do you track leads from Twitter posts? The bit.ly URL shortening service is one way (socialmediatoday.com)

This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

This week's tagging project: a MacBook cover that displays my del.icio.us tag cloud, thanks to the folks at Pimp My Laptop.

Here's how I did it:

1. I used the del.icio.us tagroll feature to customize the look of my tag cloud and make sure it included all my tags ("size" controls how many tags display; max/min font controls the size of the individual tags).
2. I hooked my laptop up to a huge external monitor so I could make the tagroll display big enough to create a screen capture that was high enough resolution to print out clearly.
3. We took screen captures in chunks (Rob figured out the necessary size to display by working backwards from the Pimp My Laptop specs) so that they'd be even higher res.
4. We stitched it back together in PhotoShop until we had an image of the size specified by Pimp My Laptop.

Ta da! I'm now wearing my tag cloud on my (laptop) sleeve. 

When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.

And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.

When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool -- basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them -- so I checked it out.

And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared's designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.

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I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.

Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.

Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.

Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
2. Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
3. Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
5. Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
6. Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
7. Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
9. Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
10. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
11. Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
12. Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.