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.
