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I switched to delicious several months ago as my personal bookmarking tool. It’s a great Web 2.0 service that solves several previously intractable problems. I grew tired of having my bookmarks scattered across multiple browsers on multiple computers, and never knowing where to find the one I wanted. I’m also lazy and rarely changed the bookmark name to something that would make sense to me six months later. Worse, I never made note of why it was important because there was no convenient way of tagging bookmarks. In short, bookmarks were only useful for things I used regularly. Using them to mark reference material was nearly impossible. delicious fixed that, with a simple interface and universal accessibility (as long as I’m online.)
David Buchan began using delicious recently as part of his personal knowledge management toolkit, and highlights several key benefits:
I started using del.icio.us a couple of weeks ago. I was initially hesitant at needing to match my tags with the tags of everyone else, so I didn't bother, and that's what has let me get to the power of the tool.
My del.icio.us account has taught me that:
- Creating tags according to what is important to me is encouraging me to bookmark items I wouldn't have in the past (I've never really been a bookmark person because of the complexity involved - del.icio.us takes that away by mapping in a non-hierarchical direction.)
- It is a great way to share my readings with others on my team. Now if we're talking about a topic which is new to them, I can simply point them at my research; which has already been collected in one place. I recently did this when explaining the benefits of RSS.
- References for a training session can be given a common tag for the participants e.g. http://del.icio.us/quantumgardener/nct for a session on Newfield Conversational Technology
- I can branch to the tags of others when I feel inclined, but otherwise how and what others tag is of no importance to me. This is critical because I don't have to filter through people's different understandings of use of a single word unless I have the time. That said, I may take up some of the practices in a recent Denham Grey article on Using Social Bookmarks
- Using as many tags as possible to describe each item makes me think about its importance and makes for a richer retrieval experience
I especially like David's description of how and why tags work for him. As I noted in Why Tagging is Like Sex, tags are best served with some context – context that comes from having a shared understanding meaning. I almost never search for tags used by other people because they’re unlikely to have any relevance to me. For instance, I may want to tag with the word “georgia” because that’s where I live. It’s a geographic tag for me. But others may use the tag for the former Russian state of Georgia, artist Georgia O’Keefe, or the screen font Georgia.
Context only exists for those who know me, or know something about my interests. It’s unlikely my bookmarks will have any substantial value to random strangers. That’s why I see little benefit to massive tag search engines like technorati. But that’s another story…
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