Thinking about bookmarking

Oct 20

Personal David No Comments
digg, facebook, firefox, friendfeed, google reader, social bookmarking, stumbleupon, tags

Approximate reading time is 2 minutes

Last night I started thinking about a topic that could become a substantial future article on this blog. That topic was social bookmarking. This has been a subject that’s been creeping up on me more and more recently, the more I’ve used web services like Digg and Friendfeed.

Not so long ago, I made a rant against social bookmarking in that I did not care what other people were reading, and I expected the feeling was mutual. So, what changed? Well, some sort of sense of wanting to participate in large networks, and also I desire to self-promote. Let me clarify that, I didn’t want to get into social bookmarking simply to promote my own content; no, I was more thinking along the lines of enhancing my internet reputation.

What you soon discover if you look at any blog or news site, is that according to all those strange little icons you see at the end of an article (this blog has them too), that there are lots of them out there. Surely this indicates that there is a great deal of redundancy and repetition out there. Well yes, but also, if you look at all the big names, sure they publicly list user-recommended sites, but they all do have slightly different angles on how they do it. Being of a vaguely mathematical mindset, seeing all this chaos made me want to dig into them all and try to find some structure. The primary question in my mind being “When should I use which?“. Of course, the tacit assumption here being that surely not one system could be the best, most optimal, site that everyone should use!

Aha! I had myself a research project on. First step in such an exercise is not to bite off more than you can chew, therefore limit the scope of what you are looking at. Therefore, I picked what I thought were the most distinct social bookmarking services out there. Some I already participate in, some would be new to me. So here are services I’m looking into:

Friendfeed’s presence on that list is debatable, but I definitely believe it has an important role to play, even if I don’t yet understand it fully (and I confess to being a fan of the site).

In looking into this subject, it got me thinking about my own browser bookmarks. I firmly believe that my browser bookmarks are private to me. Social bookmarks are public, browser bookmarks are private. I’d be interested to hear arguments against this point of view, but that is the basis that I am working on. I digress, in relation to my own private bookmarks, I started thinking about organisation. Much as I was a sceptic about it, Firefox 3’s awesome bar and bookmark tags is really starting to change how I think about things.

I once asked a while ago on Twitter, when would people use tags and when would they use folders for organising arbirary objects. The answer I got back was to use folders only when hieracy was important (I apologise for not citing the tweet, but it’s a while ago and I cannot remember who said it).

So I shall ask you the reader, is hierarchy important to how you store your browser bookmarks? At the moment, my mind is somewhat swirling in the idea. That is because I have some sets of bookmarks where hierarchy does matter, but others wouldn’t matter so much.

I can imagine that hieracy certainly would not matter in a public/social context, which is exactly what Delicious does, it works solely on tags.

Anyway, I would love comments on this subject, and I shall continue to look into the subject with the aim of publishing a comprehensive review.