The secret masters of the Universe

I'm surprised, reading this week's blogs, to find such a lukewarm reception to delicious - I think we as the 23 Things team were expecting this one to be a hit, as we're all big fans of it and also it seems to speak right to librarians' hearts (collect things! classify them! show them to everyone else!).   But I'm getting the impression that a lot of people are a bit unsure about it, and that perhaps not everyone is realising quite what it offers, or why people are so keen on it.

The first thing I'm noticing people asking is why use delicious instead of saving bookmarks in your browser?   My answer to this is that it's not 'instead of' - I still have favourites saved for the sites I go to most frequently, and in many cases don't have these saved on delicious at all.   Delicious, for me, is more like my web library - all the things I've read on the internet that I want to save for future reference, or just in case, or because I don't have time to read them just yet but want to come back to, or just because I thought they were good/interesting/entertaining etc, as well as all the sites that I don't visit that often (and so don't want to have cluttering up my browser bookmarks), but do want to be able to find quickly and easily on occasion.   It's therefore full of individual articles and pages rather than whole sites - links to specific things like YouTube videos, short stories, reviews, comic strips, articles, blog posts, picture galleries, fics, forum posts...  you get the picture.   It's also, as I talked about in my previous post, a really useful discovery tool, but for this kind of thing - not whole sites, but for what is being talked about and produced on the web.   I suppose, to continue the library analogy, it's like my browser bookmarks are my quick reference section, whereas my delicious page is my whole collection.

The idea of delicious as a discovery tool has also perplexed some people, with complaints about volume/quality of information etc.   To be honest, my initial answer to this is 'in what way is this different or worse than Google?', but fellow 23er Laura has addressed this concern excellently in her blog, so I will say no more and refer you to her!

Finally, this week's things have really introduced the idea of tagging on a mass scale, and the concept of folksonomies.   I found this excellent article by Clay Shirky saved by someone with the ox23 tag (via my Google Reader - see what I mean about delicious tags as a resource discovery method?), which explains why classifying the web in a traditional sense doesn't work, but tagging does.   And secondly I'm going to embed a really good presentation here by Tim Spalding (founder of LibraryThing - another site that uses tagging heavily) wherein he explains the benefits that tagging offers as compared to library classification schemes like LCSH.   It's a really thought-provoking talk, and while I'm not going to be a complete traitor to my profession and advocate throwing out LCSH completely, I do think that tagging has a lot to offer library catalogues as an additional feature.   Of course, we have tagging functionality in SOLO, but as both Shirky and Spalding point out, tagging only works if a critical mass can be achieved, and SOLO is nowhere near there yet!

Learning is delightful and delicious

I adore delicious. It is one of my favourite web 2.0 tools, and along with RSS feeds is the one I'd say has definitely changed my life!   I have been maintaining three delicious accounts for over two years now - a personal one which now has getting on for 1000 saved links, a work-related one that I set up to keep track of and share specifically work-related and web 2.0 related things, and finally the VHL's account, for useful links for our readers.   I use the first one all the time, saving anything and everything that I might conceivably ever want to come back to, but it is distinctly designed more for me rather than for sharing with others - I make use of the 'mark as private' feature too so that I can save things there that I'd rather not broadcast to the world.   The other two accounts are designed more for other people, a way to save and share things that I think other people might find useful.

For the library, this has been a particularly useful tool.   There are so many really useful websites and free web resources relating to US Studies and US History in particular, and before I discovered delicious I was trying to build up a links page on our website in order to save some of these for our readers.   It was cumbersome to maintain though as I had to log in to the CMS every time I wanted to add something, and also there were difficulties in deciding how to organise the links and make the list appear manageable and have everything easily findable.   Delicious makes this all really easy - I can save links quickly as and when I come across them, and by using tags I can make that list browsable and break-down-able into smaller lists.   Our tags do need a bit of work - I keep meaning to go in and sort them into bundles but never quite getting round to it.  Perhaps I'll try and do that this week as part of the Things.   I know that the Education Library has made good use of tags to offer lists broken down by course and subject, and that's the kind of thing that delicious does really well.   Another useful feature is of course expanding on the sharing by putting the links elsewhere - our latest links show up in the sidebar of our blog, on our website (although there have been problems in general with getting delicious widgets to display in the CMS and whether they show up or not can be rather hit and miss), and are pushed out to Twitter and via RSS.

Another way in which I find delicious particularly useful is for discovering new content.   As everything saved on delicious (and similar sites) has been done so consciously, social bookmarking sites become a kind of 'best of the web'.  This means that searching delicious can have distinct advantages over searching via Google, particularly if you are looking for something which is likely to have a specific tag.   And of course then you can subscribe to that tag (or to other users if their interests coincide with yours) by RSS and get automatically notified when new things are added.   This is a feature that I use quite a lot as well, and have promoted to people as a good current awareness service.   As part of this week's Things therefore, I've subscribed to the feed for the ox23 tag in my Google Reader.  

I only really use the networks insofar as getting notifications via RSS - as I tend to only visit delicious to find something specific, I'm not going to go and browse my network just to see what's new, but RSS takes care of that for me too.  

All in all, my thoughts on delicious can be summed up as follows: delicious by name, delicious by nature!