Ever since last month when delicious FINALLY did an upgrade, I’ve been digging into it pretty heavily and really liking the result. That’s not to say that there is anything especially new here; there isn’t aside from the 1000 character description upgrade which, to me anyway, is a big deal. But for some reason it’s been working better for me on a number of levels.
In fact, all that new space has made me change some of my delicious habits on both ends of the spectrum. It’s made me sure to add a good deal of annotation to most of the bookmarks I save, and it’s made me start to expect others to do the same. Kudos to Alan Levine, Howard Rheingold and others, who fill up my daily morning newspaper with enough link detail to let me make faster decisions about what they are sharing. Here’s hoping more folks in my network will follow suit. It really has become the place that I start my reading, and I’m finding that it’s making me think even harder about my own organizational structure and how all of this flow of information works best for me. And by the way, the new Google Reader preview extension for Firefox that I just added has really made all of this much easier for me as well. Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like for anyone interested; the fact that I can comment directly from Reader is chaning that part of my practice as well…more comments.
I’m finding as I experiment with my delicious network that as I tweak it and try to hone it, I’m getting more good information than I used to. More relevant. More thought-provoking, than simply reading through my blogroll of usual suspects. It’s expanding my sources of information, and it’s making even more clear the potentials of user-generated connections. But I’m also finding the process of identifying those who make up my network interesting. I’ve been spending a great deal of time looking at the networks of those in my network, finding others who I might want to add based on the tags that they use (like do they have an “education” tag, or do they have some uniquely formed ones like “mediagoesaway“), the frequency with which they save things (30 a day = not good as does 30 a year), the amount of annotation, and who they might be networked in with.
I still struggle with the organization of all of this, but I’ve pretty much now decided to forego the tagging and sharing features in Reader for attempting to make it all work in just one place in delicious. Not sure why I haven’t caught the Diigo bug as others have, but on some level, it just feels too overwhelming in terms of the amount of stuff you can do, although from a collaborative standpoint, there is no question Diigo has some compelling advantages. delicious just feels more manageable for me at this point.
Anyway, just an update on the evolution of my info management process for anyone that’s interested. Would love to hear others to deconstruct their own processes in similar ways.