DISQUS

Are you after a talkative weblog audience, or is a passive one acceptable?

I've been happy with a statically sized passive audience for a long time, but I've ended up enjoying discussion oriented livejournals a lot too. I don't have time to run one though.

swap,

I just don't match that particular use case. When I'm visiting a site, I'm either visiting from its RSS feed (via my aggregator), visiting it because I'm a regular and know the URL, or from a Google search. I'm very rarely looking for something at the level of generality of "links about gentoo" or something like that. I'm more likely to be looking for "getting gentoo to boot on the something something motherboard", and Google is better than tagging at that sort of thing.

Here's what I like about it as a user:
- a fairly flat site for bookmark storage where things are tagged rather than buried in folders. I can find my bookmarks more easily on del.icio.us than I can in a web browser's bookmarks menu
- bookmarks accessible via my del.icio.us user page from any web browser (the "Hotmail advantage")
- the handy provision of the pop-up del.icio.us bookmarklet so that I can click "pop up post to del.icio.us" in my taskbar at any time and post a link to the page I'm looking at for later reference.

In summary: good bookmarking. The kind of thing where I thought "wow, no wonder I never used bookmarks before this." I don't care about the 'social' aspect at all: I either bookmark really popular URLs with 500 other people linking to them, or really unusual ones with no other links, so it's not as if I'm finding new friends through del.icio.us.