Social Book Marking

I created a del.icio.us account which can be found at: http://del.icio.us/jason.potsander . My criteria in selecting del.icio.us was based on del.icio.us’s popularity as a social book marking site. I’ve read that some have criticized del.icio.us’s plain design, which seems to be very text driven and lacks any superfluous graphics. I too found the text-centered design a bit hard to navigate at times, but felt that it’s popularity might overcome this downfall by socially networking others book marked sites to my own.

I found the process of joining very easy and quick. All that seemed to be required was establishing a user name, password, and email address. After I verified a confirmation email sent by del.icio.us and downloaded a del.icio.us tool bar widget for Firefox I was ready to start tagging sites.

As of this writing I have now added 14 sites to my page. Some of the resources I’ve added are:

1. http://www.bicycling.com/article/0,6610,s1-1-383-13579-1,00.html --- An review on the Cervelo Soloist Carbon which lead me to….
2. http://www.bikesportmichigan.com/bikes/difference.shtml --- An article explaining the difference between a road bike and triathlon bike, which lead me to…
3. http://analyticcycling.com/RiderAeroStudy.html --- An article on a bicycle rider aerodynamics.
4. http://www.crosscountryalaska.org/trails/index.php --- A web site in which skiers can report on ski conditions on many trails in the state of Alaska, which led me to…
5. http://forum.baart.us/ --- An Alaskan Winter Outdoors forum in which users can comment on various geographical areas and topics.

I began by going through the locally book marked sites I have saved using my Firefox web browser. After I added my most used web sites from my Firefox web browser I began to find out how I might better organize my tags. The main method I found to better organize my tags was through “bundling” them. Bundling essentially creates a folder that automatically acquires sites with predetermined descriptors that you tag each site with. Being very used to a folders mentality, I found that creating categories of bundled tags greatly helped organize my sites.

However, I found the process of creating the bundles a bit cumbersome and not quite as intuitive as I would have hoped for. To start the process you must click on a very small text entitled “bundle tags” in the lower right hand corner under “Tag Options.” From there you are presented with several open field boxes. After a bundle category is created you may then enter various tags that you would like to be associated with that bundle topic. It took me several times to properly create the bundles so that the appropriate resources were listed in the bundle. Several times I inadvertently deleted or overwrote one bundle when creating another.

I can see how the concept of tagging and bundling is more dynamic than the more traditional static folder and desktop model, however it will take some time for my practice to efficiently use tags and bundles. The constructs I have built in my mind regarding file storage and organization have worked well by-enlarge, and bundling and tagging is simply a new concept that will take some time to optimally utilize.

I have been somewhat disappointed with the touted benefits of being able to see other del.icio.us users who tagged the same sites as me. So far exploring other del.icio.us users accounts who tagged similar pages as me has yielded very few new resources that I’ve found genuinely helpful to me.

Overall I like the concept of del.icio.us as way to remotely access a list of often used Internet resources from any Internet enabled computer worldwide. I can also see the potential benefit of sharing resources, however I have to fully experience how helpful this can actually be.