Social bookmarking

Sunday, January 16th, 2005 at 05:40pm

My ‘current’ procedure for bookmarking interesting sites is to simply drag the url onto the desktop. Then every few months I sort through all these links and if any of them are still interesting I move it into the directory that is then use to generate my links pages. This process has a number of drawback with the major one being that if I am not on my main box at home I have to do something different such as sending any interesting urls to myself in an email.

A few weeks ago I came across del.icio.us which is a social bookmark manager that “allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others”.

So what I did earlier this afternoon was to create an account on to which I then added a number of bookmarks to based on what was currently on my desktop (and others that I know off by heart). The results of this effort can be seen if you are so inclined. If this works out I will likely rewrite the links page on this site to pull my bookmarks directly from del.icio.us. I may even go as far as copying what Jon Udell has done and have all of these blog entries (and maybe the items in my computer collection) automatically inserted as well. Or is that going a bit too far?

Although I spent a bit of time entering in my own bookmarks I actually spent a much greater amount of time simply browsing around to see what bookmarks other people have created, what tags they have used, how many people have bookmarked the same bookmark and then the different tags people have used for the same bookmark. The structure of the information really does have a life of its own and I wonder how long before someone does a research paper on it…

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