Occasionally I get e-mails and comments asking how I manage to find so many interesting links. Rather than the obvious "I'm online 16 hours a day" answer, one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle is del.icio.us. I use del.icio.us as my bookmark manager, but you don't have to be a del.icio.us user to get a ton of value from it.

One of the coolest features of del.icio.us is the 'popular' page. The overall 'popular' pages gives an up to date list of the most popular sites as bookmarked by del.icio.us users over an undefined period. Beyond this, however, you can find out the most popular sites as defined by tags. Tags are simply keywords. So you can easily find, say, the most popular 'ruby' links of the current time or the most popular 'mp3' links of the current time.

Take your interest and hone it down to a tag, say 'music', 'art', 'perl', 'pink', 'porn', or whatever, and put it into this URL:

http://del.icio.us/popular/PUT_TAG_HERE

Subscribe to the RSS feed or visit it every now and then, and bam.. you'll keep up with what's hot in whatever area of knowledge you want.