Last week I celebrated my sixth anniversary. No, not my wedding anniversary (we hit number 10 this summer); and not the anniversary of our business (our fifth birthday was a couple of weeks ago).  Last week was my delicious anniversary, and after six years I can say that delicious remains one of the most useful and useable tools in all of social media.

On October 14, 2004, I saved my first bookmark on delicious. It was an eCitizenship paper released by Deloitte (original URL now broken).  In my early days with social bookmarking, I experimented with additional tools, but I never stopped using delicious. I’ve now accumulated more than 4500 bookmarks in what is now my longest uninterrupted social media relationship. Other tools have come and gone, but I’m still as enthusiastic an evangelist for delicious as I was when I wrote my 2005 article for the Toronto Star on delicious and the birth of tagging.

These days I use delicious quite differently: most of the links that I’ve added to delicious in the past year were added via Twitter. And while tweeting a link gives it immediate utility to a larger audience, I still rely on actually bookmarking a link in delicious in order to ensure I can find it at a later date. I’ve experimented with a variety of delicious-twitter integration tools to ensure that all my tweeted links end up in my delicious collection, and I continue to search for an option that combines the awesome auto-tagging of tweecious with the not-having-to-run-Firefox-ness of packrati.us.

To that end, I found myself once again looking through my favorite collections of delicious tools and resources. For anyone just starting out with delicious — or trying to use it in new and more powerful ways — these ten collections are enormously useful:

1. On the delicious help pages, a list of tools provided by delicious itself and a list of third-party tools
2. The absolutely delicious tools collection was probably my most-visited web page of 2005. It remains a very useful and well-organized set of resources, with short descriptions of the tools it lists.
3. The Make Use Of list of delicious essentials lists only 8 tools, but offers detailed descriptions and in most cases, screen shots. Given the hundreds of tools you’ll find in other collections, it’s nice to see a shorter list of must-haves.
4. Data visualization is hot, hot, hot. And if you use delicious, you can generate some pretty sweet images…like the lovely (and now almost retro) tag cloud that used to decorate my laptop. Find many many more options for delicious visualizations here.
5. The ultimate guide to delicious includes a nice (but not overwhelming) range of resources, with short descriptions of each tool. It focuses on documentation and how-to resources, including guides aimed specifically at marketers, and also points to a selection of tools.
6. 8 innovative uses for delicious delivers on its promise: it has great ideas for using delicious to organize your social networking, writing and tasks. It also provides a very nice guide to getting started with delicious and to setting up your delicious-ing for maximum effectiveness.
7. Tools to analyze delicious tags, bookmarks and URLs has a manageable selection of visualization tools, plus some interesting analytics tools.
8. Mashable’s delicious toolbox is the kind of thing that makes Mashable my favorite go-to site for social media how-tos.  It’s a little old (3 years), so it doesn’t have any Twitter-delicious integration options. Still, there’s lots of good stuff here, and it’s both well-0rganized and concisely annotated.
9. The most popular bookmarks tagged “delicious” on delicious is a bit of a grab-bag, and not well-annotated (since most people seem to store their bookmarks without a description) but I’ve found lots of intriguing tools here over the years.
10. Six years is a long time to loooove one social bookmarking service, and it’s given me lots of time to write both geeky love letters about the ecstasy of bookmarking, and practical tips on how to make bookmarking work effectively (and creatively) for different purposes. Here’s the full roundup of my own delicious posts, including my social bookmarking 101.

If you’re still saving bookmarks in your web browser, do yourself a favor and take delicious for a spin; the resources above can help. And if you’re already using delicious, make sure to regularly check out the latest additions to the delicous toolbox, because it becomes more useful all the time.