Thing 9: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Prior to this Thing, I already had a very old Delicious account - I went through a phase of using it as my official "bookmarks" a few years ago, but have realised I tend to neglect sites I've saved whatever the format. I will add them to my bookmarks, but if a page doesn't have an RSS feed or information that I need on a near-daily basis, the bookmark link most likely won't get clicked. The one exception to this - Firefox's URL bar, which automatically shows bookmarks as well as possible addresses whilst you type - is something which can't really be replicated through a service which isn't software based. My initial thought was that using a site like this now would require me to change the way I use the web, and in quite a significant manner.

One benefit to using such a service, which became immediately apparent whilst trawling through my 5(!) year old links, was the use of tags - particularly the ability to search by more than one tag at once (something quite a few sites seem to be missing). If it wasn't always helpful to see "why" I saved a link, it was at least interesting. However, this also immediately brought to light some of the problems with tagging - it's a very subjective process, and so not one which might make sense to others (or, as I found, even to yourself several years later). My definition of "useful", for example, varied greatly from there first year of my undergraduate course where I did a lot of video editing and animation, to the third year where I focussed entirely on literature, to now when I'm working as a graduate trainee. I've added a Bookmarklet to my menu bar in the hopes of using Delicious a bit more - but we shall see.

I was quite excited, on the other hand, to see Reddit on the list of social bookmarking sites - despite many years of use, I had never really considered it this way. I loved the social side of it, commenting, karma, etc. but as I read it mostly to find out about new and interesting sites or events, had not considered using it to store my own bookmarks. Reddit is less navigable than a site like Delicious, mainly due to its lack of a tagging system (though it does now have "subreddits", its search function is notoriously awful). The complications which arise when information is catalogued in a subjective manner are again apparent here though - the titles don't always have the most coherent correlation to the content.