I’ve been thinking that Del.icio.us is a bit too “free form” — that is, it’s completely flat with no real hierarchy or structure. Yes, you can do “and” searches, but that’s not really structure (this is an example of an “and” search). This has changed with the addition of a new “Experimental” feature called tag bundles.

It’s a bit hard to explain what tag bundles are, so I thought I’d run you through the creation of one.

Making sure that you are logged into del.icio.us, click on the Settings tab in the upper left hand corner (the Settings tab will not display if you are not logged in). Under the normal settings controls, you’ll find the Experimental features. Click on tagged bundles.

From here, click the create a new bundle.

This is where the action is. This page is where you actually create the bundle by entering in a name for the bundle on the left (right above submit a query), while on the right you enter the tags you would like to bundle together. After filling out both fields, click on submit a query.

Here’s an example of a completed bundle that I created for the ZoingerPosts Del.icio.us account (the Del.icio.us tagged post archive for this blog). I bundled all of my WordPress category tags together under the name Categories.

Going back to the main Del.icio.us page under Bookmarks reveals a new section in the “tags” area called Categories. Instant hierarchy and structure of sorts. Yippie!

Compare the above screenshot with this one which I made before creating the Categories tag bundle.

The Del.icio.us user Remy is a good one to check out for an example of someone making extensive use of this feature Update: 2005-04-26 — or check out Del.icio.us user ubi.quito.us.

I’ll be using this tagged bundles more in the future to organize things for the two Zoinger Del.icio.us accounts (i.e., Zoinger for interesting bookmarks and ZoingerPosts for archived posts).