#10

For this post I started by going back and tagging / labeling all of my previous posts. So there's that.

I had been considering signing up for delicious for a while, so I decided that this would be a good excuse to go ahead and try it. So now that I'm signed up and have my bookmarks imported in I am not really liking this at all. I am beginning to feel my oldness I think. I don't think I'll be able to stand by delicious at all, at least as far as personal use goes. Maybe it's just something in the air today, but trying to navigate through the layout on delicious is not fun at all but rather stressful. Maybe I am anti-social but I'm not interested in having another way for people to share webpages with me. Facebook does that well enough, and so does Google Reader. By and large I can find enough information about what I'm interested in on my own, thankyouverymuch. Essentially, it's too many steps and too much noise to navigate through to find what I actually want.

I think I am in agreement with Jenna that my browser's bookmarks work just fine, that I like having a sort of tiered folder structure (similar to how I navigate my computer's harddrive). I feel as thought I have a much easier time of keeping things streamlined in browser bookmarks. Everything that I want / need to check regularly comes up in and can be searched in my Reader; I don't have any serious separation anxiety when using a machine that does not have my own bookmarks. And the bookmarks in my browser can be searched as well, independent of tags.

However, I can fully see the advantages of using delicious to share bookmarks in a library setting (or other work settings for that matter). The library I work at has an account (albeit a rather sleepy one with regards to actual activity going on), and I can imagine delicious would be a great way to exchange webpages between establishments and share new and trending ideas. Setting up multiple accounts is not a bad idea for sharing bookmarks that might be of interest to different groups of users (I think Jenna mentioned College Library having it's own account, presumably other libraries on campus might have their own accounts. Or in a public library, different accounts could be established for different branches or departments).

I don't think I would recommend using delicious for serious and / or scholarly research, though. It would be really difficult to establish credibility / legitimacy of many sources. Just because it has a tag on it that might be relevant to something you were after doesn't mean you should cite that webpage. Is there anyone that has really considered using delicious to conduct scholarly research? If so, that is a crazy thing.

Casual, relatively inconsequential everyday life research, though, sure, go nuts.