just de-lovely, and del.icio.us

What is del.icio.us, and what’s so cool about it? The del.icio.us “about” page has a succinct explanation that makes sense to me now that I’ve read more about social bookmarking web sites, but as a starting place it did nothing to help me “get it” or understand why I would want to use it.

If you look around my site today, you’ll see that evidently I did decide to use it for promotional purposes. I have del.icio.us paraphernalia scattered all around the place: in the main page list of posts, the archives, search results, sidebar, and at the bottom of permalink pages. The question remains, though: why am I doing this? Does it really enhance the promotion of my humble little blog? Does it have anything to do with freedom? And still, what is del.icio.us and what is so cool about it? I’m not sure if I can answer any of these questions, but I’m sure I can ramble on about them in the tale of my own discovery process and explanation of why these del.icio.us little icons are all over the place now.

Starting with the question of freedom, one thing that del.icio.us doesn’t appear to be is free. It is currently offered gratis, but not free as in free speech. Should this present a problem for free software supporters? Maybe to some, but not to me at the moment. If they decide to charge a fee I’m unwilling to pay, or if they take it away, it won’t cause me much trouble other than having to remove the links from my site. With the magic of WordPress, that would take less than five minutes. They also currently offer an “export to html” feature that gives you a nice page with all your links including information about when they were added and the tags you used, so (at the moment) your data isn’t locked up. It wouldn’t be hard to write a tool to convert your del.icio.us data to another format and import it into a new service.

Are there free alternatives to del.icio.us that I should be considering? Wikipedia helped me find Connotea, but it is apparently intended more for scientists. There was a site called de.lirio.us that’s since been consumed by Simpy, although I haven’t seen anything that says Simpy itself is free. They may just be taking de.lirio.us users. I first heard about Simpy in this Slashdot article about Yahoo! buying del.icio.us. Right off the bat in the discussion, some people were talking about using Simpy instead. Which in part is Slashdot SOP, to reject something when it becomes more popular or mainstream. (I didn’t read that far in to the comments — I’m sure other people have different reasons for using Simpy or rejecting del.icio.us. One of which might be the relation to the formerly free project.) Simpy looks interesting also, but I’m staying with del.icio.us for now.

So this post isn’t really about free software, which is why it appears in the “assorted” category. It’s just something I felt like talking about.

I’d consider free alternatives to del.icio.us, but it would be hard for another web site to overcome the thing that I like best about del.icio.us. The name. It’s just so cute and clever how they did that with the URL. I enjoy saying and typing it. It’s so… delicious. But that can’t be the only reason, can it? I think even if de.lirio.us had stayed around that I might still be with del.icio.us, because another thing that gives del.icio.us an edge is that it is so popular. If one of my primary reasons for using it is promotion, I want something that people are using.

But again, you desperately ask, what is it? Why are people using it? For what? Can you please get to the point?

All good questions. Did you read the linked Wikipedia article about social bookmarking? That might answer some of your questions if you’re impatient. I don’t know if I’m really going to answer the question anyway. This is more about me and my relationship with del.icio.us.

May I digress now and tell you how I slowly became aware of del.icio.us? It’s been around since 2003, according to the web site, but it’s only been the past few months that it bubbled up past my internal filters. As I geared up to start my own site, I branched out from my normal blog reading to read many blogs about, er, blogging. It’s true. There are a lot of blogs about blogging, and more often than I had seen on my regular rounds these sites have a slew of little icons and links for things like del.icio.us, FeedBurner, reddit, digg, Technorati, Rojo, Netvibes, Bloglines, and etc and etc. And etc. I had finally taken the time to learn about and use standard RSS feeds over the past year and now was confronted with all this new stuff. I wondered if I should be offering these on my own blog, but it seemed kind of tacky. [ed: As tacky as advertising and affiliate programs?] What were all these services and were people really using them that much? Would they help me promote my own site or just make me look trendy and grasping?

I was already aware of Technorati (knowing it as a big tracker of blogs, but so far not getting in to its tagging scheme), and was also discovering digg.com about the same time. I still don’t know what reddit, Rojo, and Netvibes are all about. I don’t think I want to know what all these places are — I only have so much time and attention available. I found digg to be good for directing my attention to interesting web sites, and learned that it’s similar to slashdot in the way it sends waves of readers to sites that are featured on the main page. That was easy enough to understand, but I still didn’t understand del.icio.us. It stood out from the crowd though, for some reason. I kept seeing all these links to it, and noticed that they like to talk about it at places like O’Reilly Radar. I decided to bookmark it — which for me means putting it on a static local html page that serves as my browser’s home page — and check in from time to time. I still didn’t get it. The front page seemed kind of crude and didn’t usually point to much of interest to me. Note how I was just kind of dipping my toe in the water, and I didn’t go into research mode at this time. That’s how I tend to pick up new things. They have to earn my full attention. I try to avoid going out of my way to find new things with which to fritter the day away since I have so many frittering opportunites that I’m already currently exploiting.

So I continued on my web browsing way, seeing del.icio.us links, often in conjunction with the other social-type sites mentioned above. I occasionally visited the front page but was never especially impressed with what I found there. Often times this is the sink or swim phase for me. I might drop the site from my rounds altogether, or I might find additional reasons to keep thinking about it. Along that line, I recently noticed even Minneapolis StarTribune articles have a “save to del.icio.us” link in them, and that really surprised me. It seems like such a mix of old and new worlds. I think in my mind that conferred more weight to del.icio.us.

It was when I saw that a few people had bookmarked movingtofreedom.org on del.icio.us that I finally looked closer. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, after all. I thought that was so cool, that people took the trouble to add my site, even if it’s easy to do and they might be in the habit of adding things without giving it a lot of thought, still, they bookmarked my site! That caused me to dig in a little bit more to finally learn what the place is and how you use it.

It seems fairly simple now to say that it’s a social bookmarking web site. Many people apparently like keeping their bookmarks online for the whole world to see and share. There is also the convenience factor of having your bookmarks available to you from any computer connected to the Net. The whole tagging thing is neat also. So that’s that: it looks like a lot of people are using it for bookmark organization, convenience, and sharing.

Does it then serve effectively as a promotional tool, if a lot of people are bookmarking you? I don’t know. Maybe we’ll find out. If all of these other sites are going out of their way to add icons and links and making it easy to add their main page and articles to del.icio.us, maybe it helps for something. And just like that I modified my WordPress templates to add the icons and links for del.icio.us. I’m guessing that serious del.icio.us users have add-ons to enable quick bookmarks — like the Firefox extension that I installed yesterday — but it doesn’t hurt to make things easier for the reader, right?

So we’ll give it a try. Is it just a step on the road to having one of those sites that are overloaded with little digg and Reddit and Technorati icons? Maybe. If I start adding things that I think are diggable, I can see myself putting “digg it” links on them. For now, del.icio.us (I’m just going to keep repeating that name, again and again, because it is so. darn. cool.) seems like something interesting to try and I don’t mind being yet another del.icio.us promoter, adding incrementally to their Net Shui. In the context of deciding to use these kinds of gewgaws on my web site, it makes sense to me if I support and use the service myself. I’ll try not to make them too intrusive.

I’m thinking I won’t use it the way I use my normal bookmarking system. I might just use it as a breadcrumb trail of places I went and things I learned. And then it might be interesting to see what the overall picture looks like. I wonder, should I save movingtofreedom.org to my del.icio.us bookmarks, or would that just be silly? Probably would be silly. You can find out for yourself if I succumb to silliness at my del.icio.us.

I’ve been experimenting since yesterday and have added several bookmarks. For what it does, I think del.icio.us is elegant and works nicely. It’s fun to use (so far). It occurs to me that with this trail of breadcrumbs, you’re giving people a good peek at what you’re up to. They can see when you added all your bookmarks and of course what you’re bookmarking (that’s the whole point after all). I’m not sure how much I’ll tailor the list, being conscious that people can see it. Much like Opus the penguin, I probably won’t want to bookmark pages discussing remedies for nose warts (who would?). But I’d like to be very open about bookmarking most things I run across. I might learn something about myself. And it might do me good to not worry what other people think, even while I do this with the intention of letting others see.

Another question is what does it mean if you add a bookmark to del.icio.us? Does it necessarily mean you think a site is good? It seems like part of the idea is that it could mean you approve of the site and if others use your bookmark list it can serve as a guide for them. On the other hand, maybe you see a site and want to observe it for a while before you’ve formed an opinion, or maybe you think it’s a bad site but you still want to keep an eye on it? I can’t say until I use it for a while. I imagine I’ll be bookmarking pages that I think are informative. Again, I don’t think I’ll discriminate all that much. If I find reason to visit a page and I read more than a few sentences, I may very well bookmark it. And I’m going to try not to worry too much about tags and being consistent. Just let the thing grow organically. Coming back to free software, it might provide an interesting road map of my adventures in that area.

I had fun writing this post. It started as a part of another post but grew to take on a life of its own, so I thought I’d break it out and give it its own place at the table. One thing I’m finding is that I want to keep hashing things over and keep reworking. This can be good if you actually manage to improve your writing, but the idea of a blog is also to just throw stuff out there, which I’d like to be able to do and then move on. There’s the whole quantity versus quality thing. The problem with finally publishing your thoughts is they sit out there forever. I’m afraid I’ll regret not taking more time. But hey! We have the comments section. If you think I’ve really muddled things up or am being incoherent, let me know in the comments and give me the opportunity to revisit the topic and further develop my addled thoughts. You can help me improve my presentation over time. I’d be much obliged.

So what do you think? Silly? Have you heard of del.icio.us? No? Is it something you could see yourself using? Yes? Do you use it? How do you use it? Is it vicious, or malicious? Or just de-lovely, and… (sing it). What’s the deal with all this social bookmarking stuff? Why is the sky blue? Where do people go when they die?