Anybody that runs a website will probably have wondered at some point how many times their articles were actually getting bookmarked on social bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, so I decided to figure out the easiest method for seeing that number.

Turns out, del.icio.us provides a very useful URL history page that gives you all the information about everybody who has bookmarked your page, including a grand total.

Manual Check

Browse to http://del.icio.us/url/ and then enter in the link in the box to see how many times it's been bookmarked.

Use the Bookmarklet

Browse over to http://del.icio.us/help/urlhistory to get a bookmarklet (near the bottom of the page) that will give you a button to simplify the process. All you have to do is click the button, and you'll see the URL history for the current page.

Use the Tagometer Badges

Arguably the simplest way to get this information is to integrate one of the badges that del.icio.us provides into the design of your site. I'm not a big fan of widgets, but these ones really aren't bad.

Tall Badge of Courage:

The Thin Line Badge:

These badges require adding javascript to your site. Wordpress users can use this plugin.

Total Bookmarks For Your Site?

Neither the del.icio.us APIs will give you aggregate data on the total number of bookmarks across all the pages in your site. Theoretically somebody could write a script to submit every page to del.icio.us and parse out the totals, but I assume that would violate some type of terms of service and you might get banned.

Hopefully they add that functionality to their API, because it would be extremely interesting to see some metrics on which sites have the most bookmarks.