Week Six: Tagging and Social Bookmarking

As you can tell from this week's title, 23 Things Kansas is tackling the issue of social bookmarking, particularly Delicious.  Ah Delicious, my old friend, we have come full circle.  After years of being separated, fate has brought us together.  Have you changed? Will I try you, only to abandon you again? Did you miss me? Oh cruel fate, why do we do this to each other?

I tried Delicious when it first came out in 2003 and at the time it was useful.  Aggregators, RSS readers, call them what you will, where not that popular or prevalent at the time and having an online site to hold all your bookmarks came in handy.  However, once RSS became popular and achieved ubiquity, I lost interest in Delicious.  Delicious was replaced with Bloglines, which was replaced with Google Reader, which was replaced with Firefox add-ons and Microsoft Outlook's RSS component.

I also found that I no longer have the need for hoarding bookmarks.  Over the years I have whittled the internet down into two manageable chunks.  Those websites I look at consistently are bookmarked and those I read occasionally go to Google Reader via RSS.  Bookmarks are then further divided into "Work" and "Home" and rarely do the two meet.  Therefore, keeping a list of both "Work" and "Home" bookmarks online has little appeal or practical use. After spending around four hours each day in front of a computer at the reference desk for the past nine years, I finally hit the end of the internet.

Therefore, Delicious and I parted ways amicably some time ago.  However, with true 23 Things Kansas spirit, I took another look at Delicious, but alas, it was not meant to be.  While Delicious has improved its interface, added many interesting features, and simplified sharing and networking, my core reason for not using Delicious remains; I just do not really need it.  Which is perfectly fine. All of the sites, software, and tidbits on the internet are merely tools, and as such we should find those that are helpful and disregard the rest. 

If you have not tried Delicious or social bookmarking, you can take a look at my Delicious bookmarks and see how the program works.  If you think it would be useful, join (Delicious is part of Yahoo!, which allows you to use your Yahoo! account with Delicious) or simply move on to the next interesting internet trend. Serveral libraries use Delicious to store reference links for staff.  Others use them to keep track of websites they visit while doing research. (I would recommend Zotero or CiteULike for this later function. Check out my blog post on Zotero.)

How do you use Delicious or other social bookmarking sites?  Why do you find it useful?  Have you hit the end of the internet?