It’s been less than three months since I celebrated my 2000th del.icio.us bookmark. Maybe it’s too early to tell but it sure feels like an exponential growth. It might have to do with my increasing list of feed subscriptions and my decreasing amount of time to keep up with them.
del.icio.us is a continuous record of my procrastination. Michael Stevenson analyzed what del.icio.us users are putting off when using tags such as ‘todo’ and ‘toread’. When looking at my own tags and found a wide variety of ‘to’ tags including ‘todotomorrow’ which I never accomplished and finished. Here’s the complete list of my procrastination:
Appropriately enough I tagged my 2500th bookmark with ‘toread’ as well. It is an article titled Say Cheese! The Revolution in the Aesthetics of Smiles by Fred EH Schroeder. Jill Walker Rettberg mentioned it on her blog and the title caught my eye. Unfortunately the article is behind the great academic firewall which danah boyd proposes to break down as she explains in her blog post ‘open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals.’
I bookmarked the article because I love taking pictures but I want to read more papers on the topic photography and the topic of aesthetics in general.
The title of the article reminded me of Erik Borra’s smile project which really makes one smile :)
It’s been over six months since I celebrated my first thousand bookmarks on del.icio.us. Time flies when you are having fun because I didn’t even notice I crossed the 2,000 bookmarks two days ago.
But I cordially invite you to my belated “2,000 del.icio.us bookmarks” party! The center of attention today is nr. 2000:
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Essential Blogging – Google Book Search edit / delete
to blogging corydoctorow book … 2 days ago
I am currently writing my MA thesis on Blog Software and I was looking for an article which I thought was titled ‘The Anatomy of a Blog.’ Google served me Cory Doctorow’s book on Essential Blogging which contains a piece on ‘The Anatomy of a Blog’ and ‘The Anatomy of a Blog Post.’ Great, but then I remembered the article I was looking for was Meg Hourihan’s ‘What We’re Doing When We Blog‘ which contains a paragraph on ‘The Anatomy of a Post.’
Thanks to del.icio.us for enabling this party. Now I really need to get back to work.
I recently celebrated my 1000th bookmark on del.icio.us and mentioned some things I would like to see implemented such as usage data:
- revisiting links data
- sorting your list by frequent use
- attempts to double post a link (as an indication of importance)
Erik kindly offered to talk about possibly implementing some of these features by developing a Firefox plugin (we will keep you updated on that.) In the meanwhile I am using del.icio.us more extensively with the “post for” and “your network” features.
The network feature in del.icio.us is a nice feature as it allows you to see what your friends and colleagues find interesting. What I miss though is a network of strangers with interesting finds. del.icio.us could perfectly function as a social network that allows you to find things through people with the same interests. This social network could be gathered by matching users through collaborative filtering. Two sets of data would be interesting to use:
- Shared bookmarks (Jon Udell: Collaborative filtering with del.icio.us)
- Shared tags
I think del.icio.us could really benefit from adding more features to its service. While del.icio.us is meant as a way to share your bookmarks online it is still a very individualistic tool just waiting to truly embrace the community.
I just passed the thousand bookmarks on my del.icio.us account and the winner of the number 1000 entry is: Semapedia.org as recommended in a comment by Erik. Close candidates were: number 999: Quickeo – Private file sharing with a simple email! and number 1001: Code bloat – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I started using del.icio.us on December 9, 2005 and my first bookmark ever was appropriately titled Tagging: What is it Good For – Part 2. In the meanwhile I have discovered what tagging and del.icio.us are good for. I bookmark pretty much everything that I come across and find interesting. This has resulted in 35 objects that I have tagged ‘toread’ and still haven’t found time for to actually read. I tag my objects with whatever I think is relevant and I use a lot of tags instead of just a few. My associative thinking might change and the more relevant keywords I use the more chance I have of finding it back. I love the recommended tags and popular tags features and I use them quite often.
The only thing I don’t properly do is bundle my tags. I bundled a few tags for some university courses but the rest is a big gigantic unorganized list. Usually I can find everything in this huge unorganized list thanks to my abundant use of tags and associative thinking.
What I hardly use are the ‘links for you,’ I received only one link ever and it looked more like spam. I also hardly ever post links for the people in my network. The network is a good way to keep track of what your friends, class mates and likeminded people find interesting and now and then I just scroll through their list to see if anything interesting has been posted.
What I would love to see is the option to sort your list by frequent use. There are sites that I bookmark and frequently access through del.icio.us such as a bicycle route mapping site for Amsterdam. They have an URL I can’t seem to remember but whenever I go to del.icio.us I just search for bicycle, click and I’m done. I could bundle these sites or tag them with popular but I think it would be really interesting to display which bookmarks you revisit and how often. Because that is the whole purpose right, to bookmark sites for future reference? Nothing prevents you from bookmarking tons of sites but at one point you might want to clean up and delete those sites you have never revisited.
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