Dan was kind enough to point me to del.icio.us. It took me a while to find out that del.icio.us = Delicious! Well, it certainly is quite a tasty site. You can download a small utility for your browser (usually it’s a bookmark) so that when you’re on a page you like, click the bookmark and fill out a small form to add it to your list of delicious links.
You’ll notice at the bottom of my side bar, I have a feed of my latest delicious links.
It works in a manner similar to Flickr. You manage your links using tags. It looks like tagging is all the rage among bloggers now. Tag your photos, tag your blog entries, tag your links….what next?
What’s interesting is this concept has been around since the days of the librarian and HTML itself. A coworker of mine gave me a book about Information Architecture, and in it they talk about labeling data, but they stress the importance of a standardized vocabulary. For instance, if I’m looking for “Volvo” I would think to look under the “Cars” tag, while Joe might think to look under “Automobiles.” I can see where all of this tagging could be a problem for people looking through Google or some other multi-site search engine. We already see this problem on Flickr. I may have tagged a picture of the Capitol with “Washington” and “DC”, while someone else might tag it with “WashingtonDC”. However, it seems to work well within the context of a single blog or a single Flickr page. The author of the blog and the photographer have self-limited their vocabularies.
Sometimes I think I should have gone to school to be a Librarian. It’s fascinating! I love organizing things like books, CDs, databases, etc. But I hate cleaning my house. Go figure!