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December 08, 2006
End of Semester: Del.icio.us report -brennels
I’ll separate this post into two parts:
1. Notable aspects of my del.icio.us site
2. Various comments about using del.icio.us
1. Notable aspects of my del.icio.us site
-Sites I frequented and blogs I read
Some of the sites I went to regularly for information:These sites update social networking articles on a daily basis. The information on these sites are more weighted towards information than they are actual analysis, and are frequented by news about launches, buyouts, mergers, viruses, rumors, failed ideas, etc. In addition to allowing comments on each article, mashable.com allows you to read all of the blogs that used the article as a reference. Using this feature led me to different blogs that were centered on social-networking topics.
Another way I found sites was by searching 'social network' in del.icio.us., which returns over 4000+ pages. Websites I tagged through this method were usually separated into two areas: links to actual social-networks, and links to interesting analyses of social networks.
-Notes Section
On most of my tags I utilized the 'notes' feature, and wrote a description of the website I tagged. I found this useful and helped me remember particularly interesting sites. I also took advantage of a neat feature of del.icio.us that puts any text you highlight on a page directly into the notes section. I would use this by looking through a site, highlighting an important idea, and then tagging the site (the highlighted portion is imported into the notes section without you having to type anything.)
In addition, I utilized the notes section by including '**' before specific sites that I found EXTREMELY interesting and definitely wanted to remember after this project was done. That way if I ever wanted to look at those pages again, I pull up my del.icio.us site, hit 'ctrl-f', type in '*', and it would take me to all the tags I wanted to remember.
2. Various comments about using del.icio.us
-Cool things I found
Daily Blog Posting: A cool aspect of del.icio.us that I would use if I regularly wrote in a blog would be, their 'daily blog posting' which is a feature that will automatically post an entry to your blog each dayshowing showing your latest bookmarks.
Populicious: An interesting site I used is Populicio.us which has a collection of popular sites with more options than the main del.icio.us page: most popular within the last 24hours, 48hours, week, month, all-time.
Rename Tags: I found this extremely useful when changing tagged sites that I originally used commas on. I wasn’t aware at first that you didn’t need to use commas, so I ended up having multiple tags for things I only wanted one of. For example I had group136 and group136, very annoying!
-Things they could improve on
Poor organization of bookmarks: Why can’t you put bookmarks in certain folders? I understand tagging is used as a way to sort entries but I think there are better ways to organize information than a 'tag cloud'. Especially if you noticed a trend over a period of time and wanted to group pages together, you’d have to go in and change each individual pages’ tag.
Option to leave comments on others’ bookmark: While browsing other social bookmark sites I came across 'Furl' which allows you to leave a comment on others’ bookmarks. This could be very useful if you wanted to share your thoughts with another user and let them know 'hey if you found this article interesting you would probably really like www.whatever.com/article1234' del.icio.us has the 'for: user123' option, but this option would be a vast improvement over the current interface because you wouldn’t have to have this user in your network and you would have the ability leave to comment on their tags, not just create a tag for them.
Ability to rate pages: If you find a certain page EXTREMELY engaging there is no way to document this besides adding a description that has 'read this!.' Using a rating system could assure that very interesting/innovative pages make it to the top of the hotlist
Posted by brennels at December 8, 2006 10:12 PM