Bookmarkers

Bookmarkers are cool tools. When the first one I was using retired itself about 5 years ago, it recommended spurl, which had a nifty option of transferring all the bookmarks I had saved at the old site. del.icio.us appeared about the same time, but it didn't have a way to keep bookmarks private (that has since changed - you have the option of making it public or not when saving a bookmark). So I used two for awhile. In the end del.icio.us was just easier to use. If I needed to get to my bookmarks on Linux, for example, from the shared Reference desk computer, I could just type in del.icio.us/clbean/linux.

But what makes them even cooler is using their RSS feeds. Spurl and del.icio.us, and probably all the other bookmarkers as well, have RSS feeds. Besides it being a time sink, it is an easy way to discover new resources that others think are important enough to bookmark and tag. Like browsing any RSS feed, you can usually tell just from the title if it's something worth checking into or just deleting from the list. Both spurl.net and del.icio.us have "hot lists" of things that are being bookmarked by lots of people. Spurl.net also has a "just in" category. Initially, the hot lists were pretty useful. But they seem to have fallen prey to link spammers: they're getting a high signal to noise ratio.

Another good use of the social bookmarking sites is searching for resources. You can browse by tag (del.icio.us generates tag "clouds"), or search by tag or keyword. While one could do this on any search engine, think of it as an alternative ranking system, where people's votes (by bookmarking) gives an indication of it's usefulness.

For example, searching del.icio.us for "palm beach county library" (see the image below) shows 88 web pages have been tagged with those terms. But it also shows how many people have saved the same page. While the Palm Beach County Library System Home Page was saved by 22 people, 14,526 people have saved the Google Maps location for the library. Notice the highlighting for number of people who have bookmarked an item. Fewer numbers are lighter, and higher numbers are darker, giving a quick visual indication of "ranking."

del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo.com, who, so far, hasn't made any significant changes. But since they eventually required Flickr users to have Yahoo! accounts after they acquired it, I'm waiting to see what happens with del.icio.us, and scanning the horizon for a possible replacement. There's always Spurl, but right now it's not as good a del.icio.us for my purposes.