Today is the first of our new weekly Friday Bookmarks blog post series. The concept is simple: the team here at Congruent Media relentlessly scours the tiniest corners of the internet in a constant search for the news, knowledge and trends shaping the online world. We'd like to share our findings with all of you.

To keep it simple for us, and organized for you, we're using our Delicious account to tag every article, blog post or new gadget we find during the week. Then, each friday, we'll post a link to our Delicious account, where you can rummage through our brain dump and pull out anyything of interest.

Here's today's tag, which includes a few new tools released by Google, a few interesting trend reports by Nielsen and Forrester, and a few useful posts from some of our favorite blogs: http://delicious.com/congruentmedia/11.14.08. Enjoy!

What is Delicious?

Since this is the first week, and many of you are probably perplexed as to what Delicious is, here's a quick summary.

Delicious is a social bookmarking site, which falls under the Yahoo banner. Delicious allows users to bookmark any web page they find on the internet, very similar to the bookmarking function in your browser. However, instead of these bookmarks being confined within your local browser, these bookmarks reside on the Delicious server...which means you can access your bookmarks from any computer. You can also see how many people are bookmarking a particular page, share bookmarks with friends and display your bookmarks for everyone to see (like we're doing here.)

Organization is Key

Obviously, organization is a key issue once you start bookmarking every page you come across. That is where tagging comes in. You can tag bookmarks so that you can easily find them later. let's say you often bookmark webpages about red lizards. Well, you'd tag all these bookmarks as "redlizard." Since Delicious organizes your bookmarks by tag, you can go into your account, click on the "redlizard" tag and you'll see a list of all webpages you've bookmarked about red lizards.

You can add multiple tags to a bookmark. So if you bookmark an article about red lizards doing lots of shopping online, you could tag it "redlizard" and "ecommerce."Best of all, Delicious gives each of your tags a friendly url so you can share subject related bookmarks with anyone.

For example, along with the subject tags, everyone tagged bookmarks this week with 11.14.08, which is today. That way, we can easily post the Delicious url of: www.delicious.com/congruentmedia/11.14.08. This provides an easy way to organize and share information. 

How to Read our Bookmarked Pages

When you click on our link for the bookmarks of this week, you'll see this screen:

Here's this week's list of noteworthy bookmarks. The title is in bigger font on the left side, with our own brief description below. Skim through the list and click on any title you find interesting, and you'll be whisked away to that web page.

If this all sounds confusing, don't worry it's really not. The learning curve on Delicious is very short, and once you get the hang of it, you'll find yourself signing up for your own account. I've been using Delicious for awhile now, and can't imagine how I made do without it. When you do sign up for your own Delicious account, make sure you add us to your network so we can swap bookmarks back and forth.

Once again, here's this week's bookmarks: www.delicious.com/congruentmedia/11.14.08. Enjoy, and leave a comment to let us know your thoughts on this series.