Delicious Links
The del.icio.us “social bookmarking” webware continues to interest me. It’s quite a lot better than my previous post made it sound. My suggestion is to play with it a bit; set up an account and post some URLs. Then just navigate around the site to see what else you can find.
One thing that I found fascinating is the different views people have on the same information. A couple of examples:
I posted a link to the SMH Equinox serialization that I mentioned a few posts back. [You are reading it, aren’t you?] One other person picked it up, but look at the description they used. The description attached to my link was “ Serialisation of Matt Rubinstein’s excellent novel-in-verse about Sydney”. The other person copied (is that the right verb?) that link but deleted the word “excellent” from my description! Or maybe they independently came up with an almost-identical description? I wonder why they did this? Maybe they wanted to reserve judgement on it before applying the adjective “excellent”? (fair enough I guess)
Another thing that caught my attention is the differing styles of tags that people use. This is a feature of del.ici.ous, the idea is that you organise your links by giving them tags which are just single words. Each link can have multiple tags and you can query on them, either just your own links or everyone’s. It’s like a word association game!
For a good example, check out the differing tags on this link about cricket. I thought “sport” was the only tag I was likely to need for this link, but others had tagged it with “reference” (fair enough), “info” (a bit generic perhaps), “memes” (really?), “travel” (err, I guess so), “misc” (why have a tag at all?), and other variants on sport. My favourite is the following list of tags from one person: “absurd geek guide narrative system”.
Just think about that for a second: there is one person in the world who, when asked to associate words with the rules of cricket, comes up with “absurd geek guide narrative system”. Someday I want to meet that person.
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