Magic Dave Ball

Help! I’m drowning in bookmarks! There are bookmarks in my browser at work, in my browser at home… even on my brand, spankin’ new iPhone! They don’t sync and, even worse, I don’t know why those sites were important to me at the time! What are these bookmarks for? They don’t scale! I don’t even–

I’m gonna stop you right there. What you need is del.icio.us.

(yup, that icon is really small.. squint if you need to)

del.icio.us is a (brace yourself) free, social bookmarking service. What does that even mean? What does any of this mean?

Gratuitous Background

“Delicious” comes to us through Middle English via Old French from late Latin… wow, okay, yeah, etymologies are tough. Anyhoo, it comes, ultimately, from Latin and means ‘delight’.

And that is what this service offers you, its users — sheer linking delight.

Although I’m covering del.icio.us here, be aware that a whole host of social bookmarking exist and have tons to recommend each of them. Some of them even have names that don’t make a lot of sense (Simpy, Furl, and Diigo)… it’s the Web 2.0 way. Smile and be happy.

Install del.icio.us

Oh, wait, you don’t have to. My bad, next section.

Oh, okay, yeah, this section does have a point: Before you go, be sure and sign up for a del.icio.us account. Whew! Thank goodness this section served some purpose.

Tasty Links

The whole point of del.icio.us is to share bookmarks with people. Yeah, I mean, y’know, that’s cool… sharing links with people. Sure. Totally.

I gotta admit, I don’t participate that well in social networks. It’s a failing I hope you four can all forgive me for. Yes, I know, I used to say that I had three readers (hi Mom!).

Since del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site, it would seem that you need some bookmarks in there. So how the heck do you get bookmarks into this fabulous service?

Turns out, there are multiple ways:

1. Click on the bookmarklets you’ve previously dragged to your bookmark toolbar.
2. Grab a super-useful Firefox extension to manage this stuff for you.
3. Manually enter your bookmarks into the website. But you wouldn’t do that, that’s super-boring.

Personally, I find the bookmarklets the most intuitive, the least disruptive to my flow. A friend of mine likes the Firefox plugin better, since it helps him actually find what he’s looking for in the sea of his bookmarks.

The del.icio.us site offers some help with how to actually create and use the bookmarklets. Why don’t you go to the help page and create the bookmarklets now? You should end up with something that looks like this:

What’s that web browser you’re using there? And what the heck is “Tumblr”?

I’m purposefully teasing you here. All in good time. Trust me.

Where was I? Oh, right. Now that you have those bookmarklets why not navigate to Google and click on that “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet. You should see something like this:

What do these fields mean? “description” makes sense (even if it probably should have been “Name” and capitalized), and “url” of course makes sense… what the heck is that “tags” field, though?

Excellent question, young padawan. The concept of tags can be simple, or complex… shallow, or deep… easy as Sunday morning or hard as some brittle, hard thing. Some would say it depends on how much Kool-Aid you drink. Others (myself included) would say that they are the keys to a kind of digital wonderland.

Tags: The Kool-Aid Definition™

If you know tags, skip this section. Or, maybe, just read the end bit.

Tags are like card-catalog-style categories in that they allow you to organize information along a custom taxonomy, a vocabulary that you define for yourself. A taxonomy is simply a collection of taxa (singular taxon) that you use to classify –

Wow, this is so not working for me. Got anything else?

Uh, erm… okay, a little simpler then.

Imagine that a tag represents a single concept in your mind, a little atomic nugget of semantic meaning in your head about which you gather, like diaphanous, gossamer spider-webs, bits of information related in some fashion to that little nugget. By positioning these pieces of information in a kind of n-space created by these “tags”, you can –

OH MY GOD KILL ME NOW!

Right, then.

<ahem> A tag is a label, plain and simple.

That’s it?

That’s it.

Why couldn’t you say that before?

I did. But there’s this galaxy of usefulness around tags that you should know about. Tags are a big deal.

How’s that? How are tags any different than a card-catalog in a library?

Um, well, you see… okay, okay, think of it this way, starting from the painfully obvious: You are not the only person using the Internet. There are hundreds of thousands of other people surfing around, checking out stuff, finding things, etc…

Yeah, duh.

Pay attention. It gets interesting right about here.

You take yourself too seriously.

Talk about “stating the obvious”, sheesh.

Where was I? Oh, right. All of these people surfing around are building a model, in their heads, of what the Internet looks like. As they do that they could be said to be building a taxonomy of what they’re seeing. This taxonomy isn’t that useful to us until they tell us about it. Once they start telling us about it (through, say, a social bookmarking service) a funny thing starts to happen. The whole Internet gets enriched by these tags, the usefulness of each page increasing as the number of tags for that site increase.

In fact, if you wanted to find a bunch of sites that other people found useful, you could navigate here:

http://del.icio.us/tag/useful

See that last bit of the URL? “useful”? Anything that anyone using del.icio.us tagged “useful” will be listed in the series of pages that del.icio.us retrieves for you. Try it with different, more specific tags (”cats” is a personal favorite).

In a sense, you are getting a glimpse into other people’s brains and seeing how they categorize things. Maybe they categorize things in ways you hadn’t thought about. Maybe they don’t mean the exact same thing you did.

Actually, you want them to mean different things and to find new categories! That makes everything more useful! It creates a (wait for it) network effect whereby everything gets more useful the more people that use it.

So, that’s tags in a nutshell.

Look, just go read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger and you’ll learn all about it.

And don’t talk back anymore or this’ll take forever.

Help Me Out Here

Go tag a couple of sites using your bookmarklets. Nothing too radical — just tag Google as “search useful tool free google” (del.icio.us does space separated tags) and CNN as “news cnn” and Magic Dave Ball as “useful free magicdaveball awesome cool funny smart”.

You might quickly become frustrated by space-separation in tags because it makes you do seemingly clumsy things like “socialnetworking” or “johnpauljones”. If that bothers you too much, check out Ma.gnolia where tags can contain spaces and are, instead, comma-separated. Ma.gnolia has some neat social networking features as well and might get covered at a later date.

If you’re super smart (and I know you are!) you’ll realize that tagging things “cool” is, somewhat ironically, not.

Enter the Exocortex

Remembering things is hard. I, personally, have a terrible time remembering things that aren’t of vital importance and, instead, rely on computers for all of my persistent memory needs.

Think about that for a second. Relying on computers for all my persistent memory needs. Besides being an obvious invitation to our robot overlords to conquer my piddly human butt (hey guys!), it has some interesting implications.

Imagine tagging every page that I want to read at a later date “toread” (you’ll grow to fear “toread”).

Imagine tagging all those coding blogs you read with, variously, “javascript”, “c#”, and “reference”.

Imagine tagging any product you want to buy “tobuy”, as well as noting the reviews with “review” and the product name.

Imagine tagging your friends’ home pages with “friend” and their name.

Now, if anyone asks you, “Hey, do you know of any interesting coding blog entries about garbage collection in C#?” you can swiftly answer, “I don’t remember right now, but let me check del.icio.us and see what I tagged ‘c#’ and ‘garbagecollection’.” (emphasis mine)

On second thought, of course the emphasis is mine since I’m writing this. Anyhoo.

You don’t have to remember all those interesting web pages you’ve found because del.icio.us is remembering them for you.

Step back, take a breath, and then read it again.

del.icio.us is remembering web sites for you.

Please make sure your tray tables are in their upright and locked positions.

Things To Remember

del.icio.us starts becoming very useful once you’ve been using it for a while. Make some friends, introduce them to del.icio.us, then watch what they tag.

So, remember:

1. Tag some websites.
2. Build your taxonomy.
3. Do us all a favor and don’t tag things “awesome”. I regret it every day of my life.

Tag away, all four of my faithful readers!

In Summary

Join me on the windy path of philosophical meanderings.

I mean it.

NOW.

So here you are, presented with the magical book of all knowledge (psst — I’m talking about the Internet here) but, seemingly, no way of organizing any of it. Sure, you can flip to the index and use Google, or you can look at only your favorite chapters… but here’s where the book metaphor runs out.

Books are organized the way the authors and publishers want. The Internet is organized the way you want. In fact, using a social bookmarking service such as, say, del.icio.us or Ma.gnolia, you are organizing your little bits of the Internet every time you make a link.

Better yet, everyone who uses these services is organizing the Internet as well. And you can spy on them and see if how they do it is useful to you.

And that’s (wait for it)… awesome.

I’m “drhayes” on del.icio.us. Tag anything “for:drhayes” and I’ll get it. Or, tag it “magicdaveballideas” and I’ll take a look.

Better yet, leave some frickin’ comments. Come on people… my spam filter needs a workout.

Tune in next time as we cover… personality spamming!