I know, I know, what, del.icio.us is so old school. And didn’t they get bought and killed off by Yahoo? Well, actually all Yahoo really did was make it Delicious.com, but fortunately they sold the technology to AVOS, a company founded by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.

But, that’s not really what this post is about.

I still use Delicious every day to bookmark and automatically publish content to the web via RSS and I think you should too.

At the root, Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which means you can use it to find and bookmark and tag stuff all over the web. I use it to create collections that I then post in my Saturday Weekly Favs post. I use it to curate collections of things related to marketing topics. I use it for research and I use it to publish filtered content to a number of pages.

Basic bookmarking

Bookmarking is a pretty basic skill these days as you must be able to find and aggregate large amounts of information of risk drowning in the virtual sea of stuff related to your chosen field.

Even the simple act of blogging requires the ability to find and sort various sources and few things are handier than a site like Delicious that is both discovery engine and reservoir of other people’s discoveries.

I use the Firefox addon that allows me to right click and add any page to Delicious, but you can find bookmarklets and other browser tools here.

Content discovery

I’ve also long used Delicious as a content inspiration source. I find that the users of Delicious are some of the old Internet souls that know quality from viral and I can always count on a romp through my favorite tags to produce ideas for my own content production.

The new Stacks feature brings a bit of a visual element, but you can still find the basic text links here too.

Auto publishing

One of the most underutilized features of the Delicious technology in my opinion is the ability to grab tag specific RSS feeds. Any tag you create produces a unique RSS feed. What this means is that you publish a dynamic feed of content related to a subject to simply publishing the RSS feed to any page. I bookmark lots of tools that I find to a resource page on my site by simply using Feedburner to create HTML code to publish a Delicious RSS feed to a page – you can view my resource page here.

All I have to do is find a new tool, right click and hit Save to delicious and tag is as “favs” and the link publishes to this page.

Custom filtering

You can take this a step further and use Delicious to help you create custom content feeds for things like product mentions, news stories and even social media mentions.

All you need to do is add Google Alerts to the previous step.

So, let’s say I want to track and publish mention of my book Duct Tape Marketing. All I do is set up a Google Alerts for the term Duct Tape Marketing and have it sent to my email inbox.

Then, when I spot a positive news mentions of Duct Tape Marketing (I mean, they’re all positive, but hypothetically speaking) I can visit the page, bookmark what I want to publish in Delicious and tag it DTNews or something like that and then it publish the mention automatically to a page or widget called Duct Tape In the News (bottom left on this page)– all without leaving my surfing.

Delicious, paired with RSS is a powerful way to create content on the fly while cataloging and categorizing the kind of stuff that helps you learn, teach and be a filter for your clients.