I’ve been using Digg for several months now and it just hasn’t quite sunk in. There’s just a lot of noise going on in their community and most of the comments people make on articles fall into the category of rude, vulgar w/out purpose, or completely off topic. I certainly don’t have timefor or interest in any of that. Then I started in on Delicious…
Bookmarks from www.galvestonbookshop.com
Hold on! What is social bookmarking anyway? Well that’s part of what I was struggling with. You have your browser to store bookmarks and you can use Firefox plugins to manage several sets or computers to keep everything in sync. What does one truly gain by using a service such as Digg or Delicious? There are several ways to use these services, but here’s what I find to be useful.
Search & Destroy
Delicious is a tag-based bookmarking service. In other words you give your link various attributes that can be referenced later, instead of putting them in a single folder. So one bookmark might go under “twitter” “socialmedia” “community” and other terms that you want to use. I started by looking at the Explore Everyone’s Tags page to see what’s popular instead of reinventing the wheel. You can use this feature to search by tag and find other people’s bookmarks about the same topic. It’s basically searching the Web by interest instead of by organic search relevance. Not necessarily better, but just different in what results you will find and also constantly changing based on new bookmarks. You can view lists by Recent or Popular, or a combination of the two that they call Fresh. I am starting to search here for certain things before I will search for something on Google, especially in cases where finding fresh information is more important than finding the 10 most relevant links that Google produces. Funnily enough, I will scroll further down the list in Delicious than I will on a Google search result, but that pschyological comparison should be saved for another day…
BFF’s
Delicious is a community, so you can befriend people that you know and people that you don’t based on common tags (topics/interests) and follow what they are searching. Of course, the fun really begins when you start tying all of your networks together. Posting your bookmarks on your blog or other networks adds more content, dimension, and personality to your sites. Community on Delicious is a bit more restricted than Digg, which works to their advantage IMHO, because you don’t have a bunch of weirdos commenting on your bookmarks and judging every little action that people make there. I never took part in this ridiculousness, but it’s all over Digg and impossible to ignore no matter what you do! With Delicious, you follow people or you don’t and you use tags to explore other members’ activity, so there’s no confrontation- just follow it or don’t.
Not a Replacement
Although some people may use the bookmarking services as a replacement or backup for their personal bookmarks, I don’t look at it this way. You can import your own bookmarks into Delicious, which is a nice feature, or you can keep it as a separate list. Using online bookmarks is nice for anybody on the move, since you can access them anywhere, anytime. You can use Delicious in several ways, so have fun playing with it and see what works best for you.
On a related note, I thought this completly unscientific review of social sites was pretty funny.
Photo from Flickr by P/UL, used under Creative Commons License.
” I Immediately called her number and my mom picked up; she had visited my parents house earlier in the day. While on the phone with my mom I used TweetDeck’s Facebook Chat feature to let her know that I located her phone and that she could go get it any time. From posting on Facebook, we managed to locate her phone in less than 3 minutes!
