Week 6, Thing #13

I began my del.icio.us investigation by trying to watch the video but that link didn't seem to work, so I decided to take the plunge and open an account. This was easy to do, though the home page did look intimidating at first with all those tags. After I opened an account, I did a search on Google and found some others had posted tutorials, but I'd already figured out what they had to say.

I imported the del.icio.us button and tag icon onto my desktop. I use Firefox so I used their method, it's a bit different for Explorer, I think. Now I was all set, except I didn't have any bookmarks, so I imported the bookmarks that I have stored on my computer. This was easy but did take a long time for the import. I thought I was just importing one folder's worth, just to see how it would go, but it turns out that I imported all of them. This amounted to 56 pages of bookmarks (10 per page). I would recommend weeding your bookmarks before you do this import.

When you import them, it uses the name of the folder you have them stored in for the tag. I realized that I'd like additional tags and started editing each one, adding tags and choosing whether I want to share my bookmarks. Sometimes it was difficult to decide on a good tag. If others had bookmarked that site, I could see what they had chosen for tags. This really helped. Another thing to get used to is moving through your pages of bookmarks. They are arranged in the order they were added so to go backwards, you click on "earlier" and to go forwards, you click on "later". Somehow, this was counter-intuitive for me.

As you can imagine, it would take some time to edit 560 of these, so I abandoned editing quickly and started weeding my bookmarks. Many of the links no longer existed and I didn't care about others so I got it way down, but I'm nowhere near finished. It is kind of addictive to organize these, add tags, see what others are using for tags, see what other bookmarks they have, and then you get distracted by the other great websites you're finding. Clearly, this will be an ongoing process, since I have been saving bookmarks for years. Happy is the person who is just starting out with fresh bookmarking! By the way, bookmarking new sites is a snap - when you want to bookmark a site, you just click on the Tag icon and a box pops up and you put in the tags you want.

Right now, I'm happy to have my bookmarks online because I will be in Zurich for 2 months this spring and now will have access to my bookmarks on whatever computer I use there. I haven't had time to think of library applications yet, but I'm sure I will. I'm anxious to see how you plan to use this in your libraries. I had fun with del.icio.us (though I do have to think about how to spell it and put the periods in, every time I type it - thank goodness for the icon on my toolbar). Next I have to learn how to bundle the tags. So much to learn, so little time.