I have two computers, my home desktop and my work laptop, along with several browsers: Mozilla Firefox primarily, but also AOL for my e-mail, and Safari for a few things that it runs more optimally. As you can imagine, between all of these, I have many many bookmarks, both personal and professional. Keeping them organized and not excessively duplicated between each browser is something of a task. Nevertheless, each time I switch between computers I find myself without a bookmark that I need, so I have to go back to the other computer and e-mail it to myself. Don’t’ say it, I know it’s ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous, I sometimes am on other people’s computers and find myself quite helpless without my complete list of resources. I just hate having to look them all up again in Google, and really some of them aren’t all that easy to find again. And I’m thinking that some of you might have found yourself in the same situation now and then.
As part of my explorations through the Special Libraries Association training called 23 Things, I added this blog to del.icio.us. Even though I didn’t really know what del.icio.us was or why I was doing adding anything to it. This actually had something to do with getting my blog to list automatically on the Wiki for 23 Things, but that’s still ahead of me in the learning curve. I also didn’t actually quite get why anyone would want to put their bookmarks on the internet; it seemed to me as if sharing them was just a bit of exhibitionism not unlike going on Oprah.
But then I got to thinking about all the times when I needed some particular bookmark and didn’t have it, particularly those ones that get me to places that can’t be found by searching such as our intranet timecard. If you don’t have that link, well, you just don’t have it and you’re not going to get paid. Not so good.
So this morning I decided to give del.icio.us a go. I imported all my bookmarks from two computers and how many browsers. I got a lot of junk along with my own links, but that’s to be expected I guess. It took me a couple of hours to figure out how to manage the system and set it up in a way that fit my needs; after all I’d named folders in different ways for subjects that really were the same thing so I had to merge quite a bit of stuff. But I’m all done now, and huh – this really is a very useful tool. It’s not just cool though, because del.icio.us really is just as easy to add bookmarks to as any browser, and it has the advantage of being always available anywhere – even if I were using someone else’s computer or browsing from the moon. Even better, it allows you to organize your bookmarks by tags, which are basically keywords.
Why organize with keywords instead of folders? Well, when you organize your bookmarks by folders, you not only have to remember the bookmark, but you also have to remember which folder it’s in; and of course some bookmarks fit into more than one folder. For example, I have some of my articles listed that I often refer people to, but they might also be in a folder for my website links which include those articles. With the folder system you’d have to put the bookmark in both folders, which bulks up the folders and makes for long lists of links. Using the keyword system, you simply choose the “Articles” and the “Cybele’s Websites” keywords and then later when you maybe can’t remember where you filed the bookmark, the system will find it easily for you through the quick search box. You see, folders are also available for organizing, but they’re called “tags,” which again is really another name for keywords. In other words, del.icio.us allows you to use your bookmarks either by keywords or folders, which is a big advantage in organization and speed.
Now there are some advanced options that del.icio.us offers which are useful as well. I won’t go into all of them, but a few are quite handy. The most interesting is that because del.icio.us is a website, I can share all my bookmarks with anyone, or not as I choose. Any of them can be made private of course; you wouldn’t want your checking account or health care company links to be public. So not only can I share my resources with my colleagues in the information profession, but other people with my same interests can easily find me. Del.icio.us shows how many other people have the same link on their bookmarks, and so for example I can see that my link to the Policymaker's Primer on Education Research is also linked to by one other person. Not many actually, compared to the nearly 400 people who are also interested in Wired magazine’s technology news. However, it’s pretty easy to find techie people to shop talk with, maybe not so easy to find data folk to talk over those kinds of topics. On the more fun side, over 700 other del.icio.us members also have Netflix as one of their bookmarks, so I know it’ll be easy to find fellow movie buffs if I need some recommendations. All work and no play you know.
Want to give del.icio.us a try? You can import your bookmarks and give it a whirl in just a few minutes so why not? I made del.icio.us my home page so that my browsers (all of them on both computers of course!) all open to my list automatically so that my bookmarks are always open. Easy breezy! And when you’re all up and marked, please do give mine a visit and say hi!
Here's the homepage for del.icio.us Now get going!
Fully Bookmarked,
~ Cybele
