Alan says that he’s moved from Furl to del.icio.us and I guess that means I’m going to have to snag his new RSS feed (though it’s kicking out an error right now.) But the ironic thing is I’ve been moving away from Furl as well, but to Jots instead, not del.icio.us. Still not sure exactly why, and in all honestly, Jots does not seem to be gaining a lot of tracking if the slow increase in URLs linked is any indication. But there is something about the look of the page that just appeals to me, and something about del.icio.us’s that I bump up against. I’ve been thinking of adding the RSS to my Jots account as a link blog feed, and, actually, I just went ahead and did it. (Thanks to Alan’s Feed2JS.)
I think at some point, you just kind of latch on to what “feels” right, sometimes at the expense of a larger community. Alan is definitely tapping into the bigger database, but then again, I’ve never gone too far down the social road of these tools anyway, save the subscribe to someone else’s feed or search feed path. And maybe that’s enough. But I do know there is a whole day’s worth of thinking and writing I need to do regarding the folksonomy stuff that’s been bubbling up lately. Organization has never been my strength…
I didn’t know what Furl was. Now I do. It sort-of does what Webliographer (http://webliographer.com/, but there’s a better description here: http://learn.occ.utk.edu/webliographer) does, except Webliographer’s not so tightly integrated with the browser. When I developed Webliographer almost 10 years ago lots of people’s web pages were mostly lists of links and search engines were nowhere near as good as Google. I pretty much stopped using bookmarks when I developed Webliographer. Lately, though, Google is so good that I rarely use Webliographer much anymore. I have my students create Webliographer’s as a course project.
I haven’t done much development on Webliographer in about 5 years. It keeps working, but it really needs CSS and, maybe, RSS. I’d almost decided that its time had passed, but my students still like it, and the handful of schools who use it continue using it.
Will,
Thanks for the pointer to an error… One of my Tahoo news stories imported to delicios form furl had an erroeneous “&” in it– I deleted the bookmark, but perhaps there is a time lag to update the feed. Also, all of those 262 bookmarks from the last 2 years were loaded as if I marked them yesterday.
You well know there is no single “best” tool for this– its a matter of finding one that suits your needs and work style. As a techie, I find the under the hood features of delicous unrivaled– plus its bookamrk tool is able to make tag suggestions based on the tags of others, its tag completion as you type them in— unrivaled. The folksonomy aspects, looking at the ways to use thw wider groups of tags, takes more time to unravel (which I am still doing). I was hopeful of the possibilty of having others contribute to a common resource type.
And there are new gems like tag “bundles” where you can group things as sort of a mega collection.. and you can tag things for other people if you know their username… and the new features so RSS feeds for tags lagged as media to generate true RSS enclosures (creating podcasts directly from a delicious tag set). I think the developers are at the leading edge of this type of service.
You could think of all the different kinds of web wide search tools that are out there, but there is only one googly king 😉
I did like the features and usability of Jots and think it can go a long way for people new to this. It is a cleaner interface, indeed. I would not worry about its lack of popularity if the group tags are not critical.
PS- Feed2JS is not going to work the next 5 hours and all next weekend do to the eletrical work at our office.