Monday, 20 November 2006
I'm a compulsive bookmarker. Let’s start with that, and get it out there. I’ve been bookmarking and categorizing useful and interesting (as well as geekarific, arty, questionable, obscure and tasteless) web sites since I first got internet access. Years ago, my bookmark collection outgrew whatever web browser I was using that month, so I moved the collection into the excellent standalone application URL Manager Pro, where it had room to grow to the 6000+ URLs I have today. Yeah, I know, it’s a sickness.
And one I need to rationalize, a little. Which is why I’ve decided to move all these bookmarks off my computer and onto the world wide web. I figure, with all the time and energy I’ve wasted invested indulging my modest OCD tendencies, I might as well punish others publish the result, so others can make use of it. So I’ve moved the entire collection to del.icio.us*, the social bookmarking web site. Ah, there's nothing so human as rationalizing, after the fact, to justify what you're gonna do anyway!
Del.icio.us, if you don’t know, was a small startup Web 2.0 company, which Yahoo bought this year. And it’s a good example of a growing trend on the internet. More and more tasks, that we once accomplished using an application on our computer, can now be accomplished with an application that is out there on the internet. These web applications are available anywhere you have internet access, which can be whatever computer you’re currently sitting at. You can use the del.icio.us web service to store, share and/or discover bookmarks, thereby supplementing or replacing the bookmark tool in your web browser.
Del.icio.us isn’t perfect. And the biggest annoyance I’ve found, so far, is that when importing your bookmarks from a web browser (or, in my case, from URL Manager Pro) all those bookmarks are automatically marked as private, which means you can see them, but they aren’t shared with anyone else. This wouldn’t be so bad, if there were some way to automatically reset them all (or, better yet, any selected block of them) to public. But since there isn’t, I’ve been publishing them in sporadic small batches.
So, you can’t yet view my 6000+ bookmarks -- yeah, I know you were just dying to surf them all today -- but you can see many hundreds of them at -- and everything I’ve bookmarked since moving my bookmarks to -- my personal bookmark web page:
Alternately, you can go to the Lists page on this web site, where (among other things) you’ll find my most recent bookmarks. Click on a bookmark, and your web browser will open that site. Or look at the “LIST OF LISTS” to find selected bookmarks listed by topics.
Or go to my Tags page to see an index “cloud” of the many MANY -- oh, it’s ridiculous how many -- tags (i.e. keywords or labels) I use to categorize my bookmarks. This may not be the most efficient way to search such a large bookmark collection, but it’s very simple. Click on a tag, and it will open a Del.icio.us web page listing every site I’ve tagged with that keyword. That list is like my personal (if semi-random) mini-directory of that topic. Oh, and in that massive tag cloud, the type size of the tag is proportional to the number of bookmarks to which it has been assigned.
These lists and tags (and others like them throughout this web site) are automatically generated by del.icio.us from my bookmark collection. And these are just some of the things that social bookmarking makes possible. The easiest way to learn about all this is to create your own (free) del.icio.us account and start using it.I’m gradually sharing more and more of my bookmarks, as time permits. If you add me to your network, you’ll have instant access to all my public bookmarks.
Please note: just because I’ve bookmarked a site does not mean I endorse it. It just means I thought that I (or you) might possibly want to find that site again, someday, maybe. If I feel it’s important to endorse or recommend something, I’ll say so, on this web site -- or, more casually, at Daily.Mykl.org -- from time to time. If you wonder what I think of a particular site that I’ve bookmarked, you can always write me and ask about it.
* That’s pronounced just like it’s spelled (minus the dots): “delicious”, as in tasty and yummy (like my griddlecakes).
