When I started using Google Reader I found the ‘Starred’ and ”Shared’ lists a great way to save or republish interesting links. Those starred items soon mount up though, and because there’s no way to categorize them you soon amass a large unsortable and unsearchable collection of links.

The ‘Shared Items’ list is also a great feature. Subscribe to the shared item feeds of a couple of good bloggers, such as Robert Scoble, and and your interesting-items-to-feeds ratio shoots up. Using JavaScript you can even embed your shared item list into your webpage to be shared with visitors.

However, after a while I found an increasing desire to save and share links that I was finding outside of Google Reader, and in some cases to add a line or two of commentary.

Enter del.icio.us.

For those not in the know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows users to collect, categorize, and share links. For example, here’s my bookmark page than can be publicly viewed or subscribed to. With just a few clicks, it’s easy to find pages from users with similar interests.

Like Google Readers Shared Items, these links can be both embedded in a webpage or subscribed to in an RSS reader. I still prefer using FeedBurner to create and manage the embedded links as it offers greater control over content and formatting, but the standard options are nearly as good. 

del.icio.us also has a feature that will post all new links to your blog at the end of each day. Handy for people who are subscribed to your blog via a feed and would otherwise miss the embedded links.

Best of all, installing the del.icio.us toolbar for Firefox or IE makes collecting links a simple two-click process. True, this is one click more than required by Google Reader, but that additional click lets you categorize or comment on the link.

I’ve been using del.icio.us to drive the external links pane on my site for a few weeks now and it beats Google Reader hands-down. I wonder, will people introduced to these concepts by Google Reader eventually switch as they seek more control and features?