Del.icio.us Thoughts

In a nutshell -- great potential, not worth the trouble personally, redundant professionally. I can see that it would be awesome help if we didn't already have all the links amassed on our HCPL website. I was very impressed with the Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users article, and it's wonderful that del.icio.us can do all those things, but at this point I am not going to try and set up an account and transfer all my bookmarks there. I consider sites like this and Rollyo to be a step (or several) away from Google, but they are just too time consuming to set up to be a big improvement. You are basically trying to do manually what google does in seconds even on a dial-up computer. I have a lot of bookmarks already saved on my computer, and I very seldom consult them, then I stumble upon new cool sites, and I don't even bother to bookmark them anymore, because I'm afraid I won't find them in my sea of bookmarks, so I put shortcuts on the desktop, and never look there either... I don't want to spend time setting up something I will never use. The idea of del.icio.us sounds very similar to what a9 -- I think -- tried to do a couple years ago, and I tried it, but never got in the habit of using it. I don't think it allowed to create your own tags, I simply don't remember. I'm not sure it's still around, I do remember Amazon.com was pushing it and offering monetary incentives.

I took a look at the lists maintained by libraries, and most of them didn't look very user friendly. Once you start tagging sites by very specific tags, the list of tags will get out of hand. For example, one of the tags was aquarium (with just one link in it), and I can't imagine time when I would purposefully look for "aquarium' on the list of tags. When your search is that specific (and broad at the same time -- not a specific animal), you might as well... that's right, Google it. A lot of tags had just one site underneath, which is not very efficient, you might as well make a simple list of favorite sites if you have them "unbundled" like that.

Moving on...