Social Bookmarks Have Me Drowning in My Own Web Surf
Social bookmarking services like Delicious, Digg and others can be a life-saver for those who depend on the Web as a business tool, in addition to the convenience they add for personal surfing. I prefer Delicious for personal and professional bookmarking. It works better for me as a bookmarking tool that mimics a browser’s bookmarking features but adds the value of accessibility across browsers. (I use two or three browsers–often at the same time.) I view Digg as a news-sharing tool, appropriate for topical and time-sensitive bookmarks, while Delicious is a longer-term reference tool. I also find the shared bookmarks from other Delicious users to be very valuable–in fact as on-target and often more so that Google search results. So Delicious it is.
Yet I find the service lacking in some ways. I strongly dislike the “space-separated” approach to tagging. As a copywriter, my hands move automatically across the keyboard. Spacing is automatic and unconscious for me. It’s kind of like breathing. When I’m in a hurry, I tend to bookmark with spaces, which results in inaccurate and nonsensical tags.
Another pet peeve is the somewhat non-intuitive approach to accessing your tags while you’re bookmarking. The pop-up suggestions and lists of tags don’t seem to be a complete look at my tag inventory. So I end up with multiple variations on a tag, making it awkward to get a comprehensive look at my bookmarks when I go back to find something. Youtube uses space-delimited tagging as well, and it just makes me nuts. Is it just me? Isn’t comma separation a more natural approach? Why can’t all these services standardize on comma-separated tagging?
After such a long time on Delicious, with literally hundreds of bookmarks and thousands of tags, I finally gave up in frustration and decided to start over this week. Perhaps it seems counterintuitive, but there were so many bookmarks over so many, many months that I could no longer make sense of it. So I started a completely new Delicious account, and am trying to be more careful and consistent with how I bookmark. At some point, I’ll go back to my old account and try to transfer over the most important and relevent bookmarks. I’m hoping that a fresh start will save me from drowning in my own Web surfing.
Feel free to take a look at my bookmarks and follow along as I tag, tag, tag the Web.
