I have been so busy playing with it and going ‘Ooh’ and "ah" that I forgot to mention that Yahoo’s bookmarking site (once a proud indie Web 2.0 flagship) del.icio.us, has had a makeover (including a new URL, now just plain http://delicious. Huh.)

I am quite happy with the addons for Firefox and IE which are expanded to take up more of your browser edges if you like that, and I do - it’s helpful for my grazing habits to have my favourite bundles of tags sitting in the toolbar in case I get too distracted with feeds.

This way, I occasionally do read, reply, listen to or research things I’ve saved.

And although I’m not a great fan of cluttered desktops, I rather like
the sidebar sitting in the browser, even though one has to return to
the del.icio.us site to edit bookmarks and tags.

There are people of course who wonder why we use sites like delicious at all, who argue that blogging is dead and that Facebook and social streaming tools like Twitter are the new face of the social web.

There are also old stodges like me who not only like delicious, we like keeping web bookmarks so much that we have a Furl account as well, where we can keep a copy of the original webpage ‘4 evah’. (Furl is owned by Looksmart and I was first introduced to it by Mary Ellen Bates, a US librarian and information professional who tours the world giving workshops on Web research.)

But there are younger people out there who, despite it being so last week, are happy to help us oldies make the most of our muddled, child-like efforts to colour in bits of the Web so we can find them later.

Here’s Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb to tell us how to build our own custom search engine to milk several sets of bookmarks from different sources at once. If we so desire.

I’m not convinced of the usefulness of that approach, but the original post she quotes from Matthew Ewing’s blog has some terrific commentary on delicious usage in general, with Marshall Kirkpatrick of RWW chipping in to offer this comment:

"thinking about it more, perhaps my preferred response would be - thank
goodness many people do tag things in Del.icio.us because using their
collective intelligence is one of the best things about the service."

I think use is something that depends on so many things, like desire and availability and time to customise your tool of choice, that I’m no longer upset that my use of the Web is still mainly restricted to collections of print items, and that my best shot at finding them quickly is to mark the spot, in some way, if only to remind myself that I did actually see this thing once before…and thought it might come in handy.

And if that’s your usage pattern, any more powerful search  technologies will still need to acknowledge that in some way. There will still be a place for people like me who are easily overloaded and want to find something - how can I put it nicely? -  more than once. Us readers, certainly, need to be able to tell the Web to behave in some ways like a personalised librarian as well as a researcher - one of the greatest things about it at present is that it can be both.

Don’t get me wrong, there are areas of the ‘in the moment’ Web I find relaxing and delightful, like concerts and art galleries in their way. I"m certainly not above visiting graphic websites to see things for the first and probably last time, just for the experience of the moment - to which end I note also that Corvida at ReadWriteWeb recommends this photo website, Vi.sualize.us, calling it ‘a place where all the cool photos hang out’.

Have a look and let me know what you think. I’m tagging it for later, Augustus.

Crossposted at Reeling and Writhing.

I don’t know why I didn’t subscribe to the if:book feed earlier.
Here’s some interesting news about LibraryThing having an interface with the British Library, thanks to the assistance of a software company called Talis, whose head honcho, Paul Miller, is a library academic and writer whose work I read in library school in the online journals Ariadne and First Monday.

As Talis has jumped into Web 2.0 in a big way, though with a Semantic Web underpinning, it’s hardly surprising they’d be advocates for LibraryThing with the big guys.

Got all mellow today, reading the feeds, and I’ve spent a bit of time at Carl Honore’s blog. Well, after all, it is still Australia Day weekend, and everyone else is asleep.
Not only does this fellow NOT have permalinks on his blog (huh!) but he has linked to this terrific post by Michele Bowman, a futurist who writes at Fringe Hog, on slow blogging. Sounds like the States are crawling with live ones, doesn’t it? In Australia at writers’ festivals, the crucial factor militating against live blogging is the requirement to balance your laptop with your glass of vino. Notebooks are much easier to wrangle, and quite distinguished, really. I’ve become faster at getting the main points of the literati’s bits and bobs down on paper in recent times, and it’s not as obtrusive as a laptop.
I I especially liked the Slow Manifesto Carl found here on Metafilter (again, if he had permalinks, I’d find it in bigger type on his blog, and some of the comments here are pretty peripheral). After commenting on Jessamyn West’s blog that I have been ‘reading too damn fast’, I realised I needed to print that one out and put it on the bedside table, or the fridge.
Perhaps I’ll format it nicely for a study wall - when I get one.

I do feel bad about this blog - at present I’m trying to write a bit more for print publications, as well as fiddle with other writing, and the ideas I can filch from blogging for those would probably have filled two blogs quite nicely once upon a time.

So it’s a recalibration time over here. Expect to see ‘Archive’ added to the header of this blog sometime soon. A slow library sputnik. And if you like this name, and you’d like to use it, please drop me a line.
You don’t have to, but I’d like to know it’s gone to a good home. Hell, I’ll even visit you.

I’m sorry, this site is very quiet indeed and may be archived soon. For now, here’s two crossposted items from Reeling and Writhing, which is getting all the action while I’m fiddling with some other writing offline. (The laptop purchased for this purpose is named Barry. He’s been a good boy so far.)
First from a couple of weeks back, this, on the part sale of that ubiquitous book of faces:

But who would have thought that social network would have had so much blood in it? 15 billion?? Is Facebook just a big…. blood orange, waiting for an exceptionally large set of choppers?

Analysts said Microsoft paid a steep price on a bet that the three-year-old company would be able to transform itself into a hub for all sorts of Web activity.

The only way this works is if Facebook becomes sort of the users’ operating system on the Internet — everyone logs into Facebook every day to get in contact with their friends and use a multitude of future applications that will be developed for it, said Morningstar analyst Toan Tran.

Facebook, a social network that lets friends share information, allows outside developers to create games and other applications for its site.

The popularity and depth of knowledge Facebook has about its users makes it valuable to companies like Microsoft and Google which want to sell advertising targeted to individual preferences. (Reuters)

And from The Australian, a few days ago - Dymocks is to offer e-books, boosting its catalogue to more than 4.5 million titles. (Its largest store, in George Street, Sydney, can hold about 350,000 hard copy books.)
The e-book project has been in development for two and a half years, with Dymocks management keeping a close eye on what has happened in the music industry and recognising that Internet sales are slowly eating away at shopfront distributors’ figures. At present it is claimed that ‘many…titles would be sold at a discount to their hardcover cousins.’

Update: There is more news on this over at Australian Writers’ Marketplace Online, at their Speakeasy blog - it looks as though Dymocks are claiming a world first on this one.

Duncan Riley has a report up on TechCrunch about an Australian Elections site launched by Google. It is not fully operational yet, and his review is short, but the space is worth tagging to keep an eye on.
Apparently it is not the first time Google has set something up for an election either.
This lovely image comes courtesy of Ms Fits of Reasons You Will Hate Me fame (and a few other spots besides.) She encourages you all to spread the word, ideally from sidebars if possible. (See her blog for the original pic.)