Mark,
When you give it a shot, make sure to head over to the Firefox section to get the new plugin for Firefox 3. :D It’ll sweeten the experience tenfold. I never really understood that stuff either, but it’s a central location for your bookmarks, so if you’re ever on the go and need to reference something, it’s all in one convenient place.
When you do check it out, also make sure to look into “Bundles”, in which you can group your tags into categories. Extremely useful tool.
Good luck with it all. I just recently came to appreciate it, as I always thought it was just a tag. But than I figured than Del.icio.us is less “social” and more just as a useful asset to your surfing experience. Especially if you’re a developer that is always constantly bookmarking things. The only thing I find really social about it is that you can see how much other people have also booked the same bookmark, that’s as far as my interaction goes with it.. But I find it pointless, with a little bit of usefulness in it.
So in short, I’ve definitely changed my opinion on it since taking the time to look into it. Even with Firefox 3’s new tagging feature for bookmarks, it just doesn’t do enough for categorization and sorting, searching, etc.