Week 4 - Social Bookmarking!

I've used del.icio.us a bit before, and played around with it more for the class. I do see some really good uses for it and the San Jose Public Library account is an example. I've also thought that it could be used as a way to replace some library link lists or pathfinders by making them more dynamic and using all the other people's stuff as a research tool. Bookmark and tag things, then feed that back into your website (or just send people to del.icio.us directly). Particularly with the browser bookmarklet tool its very easy to put stuff in there on the fly.

And there's the rub, at least for me. There's so much stuff out there, and I surf for myself, for my friends, for others at work who are working on similar stuff that I am, and at work for people doing totally unrelated things. Its almost as though I wish I had multiple accounts or personae so I could use a tag in different ways at different times. Of course I could come up with a series of "administrative" tags like "not safe for work" or "I mean this tag ironically" but then it gets even more confusing! So I have to admit that despite knowing about del.icio.us for some time, and liking the concept in theory, I haven't found a way to get to liking it in practice. I also have a laptop I carry almost everywhere, and use a bookmark syncing tool so I can keep different locations (like my home machine and the laptop) in sync.

So I find myself in the odd position (yet again) of being enthusiastic about and supportive of a tool I myself don't use :-) There are a number of Web 2.0 things that fall into this category, but its good to know about them in case I do suddenly come across a need for the tagging and sharing capabilities. I guess I also have to admit to being less social than most people which inhibits some of my enthusiasm - I curmudgeonly don't necessarily believe in the wisdom of crowds when it comes to recommending things. But its a great research tool, and I do like to share when I find out about awesome stuff. There's also the "change over time" issue - I imagine that because its very easy to put stuff into del.icio.us people do so with few reservations. But does anyone ever go back in and clean up stuff? I would imagine there's lots of old stuff floating around which doesn't get reviewed and so may not be so useful. I periodically go in and clean up bookmarks I have when they no longer work or I decide I don't want a resource anymore but I do wonder about the whole tragedy of the commons issue at 2.0 sites like del.icio.us.

Guess for now I'll keep it in the "neat idea" and "good research tool" category and see if I wind up using it more down the road. That's happened with lots of tech stuff, and likely will here too...