Dan’s Wall of the Insanely Useful

Social bookmarking services like del.icio.us use a bookmarking system called “tags”. Instead of confining your bookmarks to a folder like you did in the past, what you do is assign keywords to your information. So for example, if a website is about cars, you might use “car” or “auto” to bookmark it. Or you may use both. Or, you may decide to bookmark according to how you use the site. As such, you might give the site a tag like “daily” or “weekly”, to remind you how often to come back and read the site.

In other words, bookmarking, which should be a fairly simple activity, is now infinitely more complex. What tags should you use when you bookmark? Delicious tries to help you by giving you example tags to use, based on how the majority of other delicious users have bookmarked the site. Keeping with the social aspect, I would argue delicious does this in a not-so-subtle attempt to get you to conform to what the majority of people think the site is about.

In other words, there are two major strategies you can use Is your goa.l to:

1. Tag a site with “typical” keywords so that others will find your links, keeping with the social aspect, or:
2. Tag a site with keywords based on how you think and how you would remember to come back to the site

In other words, is bookmarking for you, or for everybody else?

For me, the utlity in bookmarking (as opposed to using just google to search for the site) is so that I can claim ownership of information I find of utility, and to make it easier to return to that information should I need use of it again.

Notice I said “return to it again”. Without a consistant way of bookmarking things (one that makes sense to ME), the tendancy is to throw anything and everything into the del.icio.us bucket, without any clue if I’m going to be able to make use of it again. One tag quickly becomes 345 tags. Some people even use 6-7 keywords per bookmark. It’s like they are thinking “I have no way I’m going to think about coming back to this information, so I’m going to try to give myself as much help as I can”. More help meaning more keywords tagged to that information. The problem with that is, tags are like roadsigns to help you re-discover your stuff. If you have to use the search function to find your bookmark, then you’ve nullified the reason for using tags. (You might as well pull out google to find it!)

Here are some tips achieving that “bliss” of being able to find your bookmarks again, when you need to:

• Use less tags. The more tags you use, the harder it is to remember which tag is used for what. 1-3 tags is much more effective then 20 tags, because doing this gives you less chance to guess wrong. (“Is it under this tag? Nope. Is it under this tag? Nope. This tag? There it is!”)
• Use delicious’ system that lets you name the title and description for your tags. If you do this, you will be forced to only use that tag for certain types of information.
• Try to ignore delicious’ suggestions of what tags to use. Or, use the most popular tags, but only use a few of them (typically the ones that make sense to you)
• Apply tag groups to collect often used or logically grouped tags together. For example, any website that has a social aspect to it (such as myspace), I can tag with “social”, or I can tag any way I want, so long as I put it under the “social” tag group.

I hope this helps you organize your links a bit better.