Thing 11 - Tagging & Delicious

I've been using Delicious regularly since July 2007, so a lot of the material in this Thing was old hat. As of this posting I've bookmarked 746 web pages. Obviously, I'm a fan of the service. It is a fantastic way to organize content and discover new websites (I'm a big fan of the list of current popular pages). In addition, I love being able to type in a keyword or browse my list of tags to find an article I stumbled upon a couple weeks ago that I now want to share with someone else. And it's also a great alternative to Google. Though, truth be told, I don't use that way often; however, if I'm looking for something technology-related, I always make sure to check Delicious. Why? Because most Delicious users seem to be techies, and the stuck being bookmarked is often of interest to techies--not that that's reigned in my inclination to bookmark everything from YouTube videos, to political commentary, to the odd reference site.

Tagging in general is something that I embraced slowly. When I first started using Flickr in December 2005, I was like, "Tags? Bah! That stuff is for kids". But as I began to upload more and more photos (eventually upgrading to a Pro account), I was like, "Well, golly, these tags are the bee's knees!". I even spent the goodly portion of one afternoon going back through a lot of old photos and updating the tags. Another tag issue that garnered my attention was proper names. At first, I just tagged photos with the first names of the people in pictures. But as I started to tag more and more photos containing more and more people with the same first name, I was like, "Well, shucks, looks like I should've been a-taggin' people with both first and last names". So, again, I spent another afternoon re-tagging all of my friends. That said, I have not embraced labels in this here blog--and I probably never will.

With regard to some of the sites linked to in the Thing 11 instructions, I have to admit to being disappointed. It seems that all of the libraries that were using Delicious when this Thing was first created are no longer using Delicious. And that really is a shame. "Why would you say that, Phil?", you say. Well, it's because I think Delicious is a much better approach to bookmarking reference websites and such than the current method. That's my opinion, of course. But I'm convinced. So there.