BitterSweetLife

Taking the advice of people like Jordon Cooper, I signed on to del.icio.us a couple days ago, eager to dive into the world of social bookmarking. On one level, del.icio.us is simply an online “favorites” compiler—you pin a “bookmarklet” to your favorites menu and then go around posting any and all fascinating sites to your del.icio.us homepage, letting your imagination run wild.

However, the real beauty of del.icio.us emerges in the way your favs are organized. You assign descriptive “tags” to each site added, i.e. “Kuhoops” or “daily_news” or “coffee,” and thereafter, you can access the entire collection via your tag system. For example, click on your “C.S._Lewis” tag, and all pages with relevance to Lewis (however oblique) appear front and center. You can also combine tag searches for greater specificity, i.e. “C.S._Lewis+research.” All your tags are accessed via your personal page (here's mine).

But the beauty doesn’t end there. The reason del.icio.us is a “social bookmark” system lies in the collaborative aspect of tags. Obviously, everyone who signs on generates her own system of tags, and these are searchable by all other users. There are no private pages on del.icio.us, so in a sense, the site is like a shared hard drive. You also have the option of subscribing to a specific tag or user (i.e. "myth" or "AjVan"), so that new posts from that topic/user arrive in your del.icio.us inbox. This has the potential to be a really cool research feature. Other people add pages on a topic, and you watch them stack up.

As a pseudo-techie who isn’t really hard-core, it took me a little while to find my way around the del.icio.us structure. Actually, I’m still waiting to reap the benefits of the subscription feature, as talked up by Mr. Jones. Maybe my subscription topics are just too narrow—or too non-technical. The latter could actually be the case, because judging from the popular tags (and lack of tags on non-technical topics, such as the Jayhawks and George MacDonald), del.icio.us’ user base is currently still pretty nerdy (in a good way, of course). I'll have to play with this feature some more. To my knowledge, there still isn’t a comprehensive, walk-me-through-this help file available, but I can’t imagine it’s far off.

Del.icio.us is free, fairly intuitive, and it's easy to jump in. Come help me generate some hoops and liberal arts tags, would ya? At any rate, my primary goal has been met, which was to do a rare thing for me: write a tech post. And here it is.