68 comments

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  Louis Gray

  11 months ago

  There is something to be said for not bookmarking. My "real" bookmarks in Safari and Firefox rarely change. And where I need to find things I've previously read, there's always Google Search. But nothing beats Delicious for "news clippings". As most bloggers do "ego searches", it makes sense to track those references and keep them in one location. I've been doing this since the beginning of the year, and it helps to see how often one blog post is referenced vs. another.
  
  See: http://delicious.com/louismg/coverage
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  That's an interesting use for it, Louis. I don't really have any interest in doing that, but I can see why you might want to. I've actually had a bunch of people say they are bookmarking things even more now -- but I wonder how many of them go back and look at old bookmarks. I tend to use Delicious to track stories that look like they are turning into something, but once the links are a few weeks old they hardly ever register on the radar again.
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  marshallkirkpatrick

  11 months ago

  I find that bookmarking things for posterity is rarely incentive enough for me to click that button. What has helped me get back into it for the last 6 months or so, though, has been tagging things into feeds for particular purposes. Items I tag "toshare" get displayed in the sidebar of my blog and delivered through a feed that Feedburner says has a bunch of subscribers, items I tag "toread" show up in Netvibes Mobile for me to read when I'm on the bus. Once those two uses get me opening the bookmarking interface, I go ahead and add some other tags too - making rediscovery easier later.
  
  I wrote about these and a couple of other ways you can "fall in love with tagging again" in this post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/love-taggi...
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Thanks, Marshall. Those are good suggestions. I use Google Reader for both of those things -- sharing through FriendFeed and through my sidebar, and for saving things that I might want to read later. The mobile Reader is excellent.
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  Blaise Alleyne

  11 months ago

  I have a bit of a hierarchical approach to remembering and sharing web pages...
  
  If I like something in Google Reader, I'll share it. If I really like it, I'll share it and StumbleUpon it (though I just started using StumbleUpon this week). Then, if I *really* like something, I'll share it, StumbleUpon it, and post it to del.icio.us (and sometimes Facebook if I want my friends to see it).
  
  What I find most useful about delicious isn't so much the individual bookmarks, but rather the sort of "streams" that are created. For example, I can link to http://del.icio.us/balleyne/copyright or http://del.icio.us/balleyne/music (or http://del.icio.us/balleyne/copyright+music) in order to share bookmarks with people, and I can grab the RSS from those streams to embed on my website, etc... I find I use that sort of functionality much more than I ever go back in search of any particular bookmark (the FF3 awesome bar is great for that).
  
  So, *shrugs* to the redesign.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  The RSS feeds of tags or keywords is a great idea, actually. I hadn't thought of that. That way you can add a link (or links) to a bunch of archival material in case people want to read more about it. I'm going to have to remember that.
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  Adam Ostrow

  11 months ago

  thanks for the shout out :-) The main reason I stopped using bookmarks is much like yours - I just never go back them. 99% of the time I can find the site/article I was looking for by poking the right keywords into a Google search. On the other hand, I use Facebook Posted Items in a similar way to how it sounds like Louis uses Del.icio.us, so I suppose I still bookmark a little ...
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Some interesting ideas in the comments here about how to use it differently. I'm glad I wrote about it :-)
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  Guinevere

  11 months ago

  I also bookmark a lot and rarely go back, but I use Delicious as my own search archive. I know if I found something interesting, I go back to my Delicious account and look. I also only bookmark if a site doesn't have an RSS feed. If a site has an RSS feed and goes into my reader, I'm very likely to be back again multiple times.
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  Vanessa Williams

  11 months ago

  I often do have trouble finding things that I previously came across. It's not always as easy for me as just searching for it again. I'm a research-hound, which is part of it. However, I use del.icio.us much less now. Instead I use DevonTHINK Pro and save and file both bookmarks, web archives, PDFs, images, documents, etc. I really do find I need a permanent database of important sources. I can't afford to waste time searching for what I need anymore!
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  I've tried a lot of OneNote type tools, but I hate the fact that most of them are downloads and therefore your stuff is only in one place. That just doesn't work for me. I've been experiment with EverNote recently, which has a Web interface, but so far I've been underwhelmed.
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  Joseph Weisenthal

  11 months ago

  I've never gone back and looked at bookmarks in delicious. A few times I've tried to get into bookmarking items with a "toblog" tag or whatnot, just as a reminder to blog something. I've never blogged something that I've given that tag to, however.
  
  For work, I keep a schedule of future earnings releases, so I have been using an "earnings" tag for purely utilitarian purposes, tagging releases that announce future earnings dates of public companies. It's so narrow and most of the time I'd have no purpose for it.
  
  Having never visited the site itself, I can't remember... did the old Del.icio.us have a similar frontpage leaderboard, like the new one has?
  
  It's kind of Digg-like looking and it confirms that the site really isn't mainstream at all. Like Digg and FriendFeed, it seems like another place to share links about technology.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Have to say I totally agree, Joe.
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  Pierre Henri Clouin

  11 months ago

  I find bookmarking with delicious still pretty efficient to share links and track things. I am curious though why they didn't include synch'up with Twitter in this release.
  
  It seems like a lot of people are sharing links on twitter which seems subpar to sharing them on delicious.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  That's a good question. In fact, one of the things Yahoo doesn't seem
  to have done is to integrate it with anything, which seems like kind
  of a missed opportunity.
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  devahaz

  11 months ago

  I use a friendfeed room to collect specific content around information overload (http://friendfeed.com/rooms/information-overload) and use instapaper as a sort of reminder service when there's some article or website i want to check out when i have some free time. everything else, remember, search, or ask like adam. so, i guess i sort of bookmark, but not in the traditional sense.
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  Shane

  11 months ago

  Well, I bookmark like a dog. I'm a big Delicious user. I have over 8300+ bookmarks and 3000 tags ;) Everything I really need is in one place. Personally, there are things worth saving.
  
  Sure you could do this in your browser by if you don't have access to your PC/laptop and you need to find something, you're pouched. It's better than scouring disparate sites!
  
  Delicious does what it does and it does it well. Anyway, to each their own.
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  leigh

  11 months ago

  I've got a new tagline idea for Yahoo. "Where great services go to die"
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  That's awesome. Somehow I don't think they're going to like it though :-)
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  marshallkirkpatrick

  11 months ago

  thinking about it more, perhaps my preferred response would be - thank goodness many people do tag things in Del.icio.us because using their collective intelligence is one of the best things about the service.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  True -- but doesn't searching through Google pretty much do the same
  thing? And it's based on a larger sample as well.
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  Joe Lazarus

  11 months ago

  Nope, I find the results to be very different. A Google search returns what's universally relevant. A Delicious popular search for a tag returns what's hot recently. Google results don't change much over time for a particular term, but Delicious tags are constantly updated with new stuff. For example, I subscribe to the Delicious feed for "music" and nearly every day I discover a cool new music service.
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  Sekhar Ravinutala

  11 months ago

  I don't know about that. E.g., yesterday I subscribed for "3D" on delicious and was surprised by the quality of the links I got. I presume the stuff was good because it's been filtered by real people vs. a Google search that uses an algorithm to move links up.
  
  I'm a relative newcomer to delicious, but have also never gone back to actually use whatever links I saved - I always end up doing a Google search. However, I think delicious is a great place for keeping hard-to-find-again links that you're saving up for future work like an article/book/project, etc.
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  andymurd

  11 months ago

  Agreed, delicious is hugely underrated as a research tool. What amazes me most is that bookmarking is an essentially selfish action - I tag pages for me, not for others - and yet it produces such astounding results.
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  Byteburn Reloaded

  11 months ago

  We have the same thoughts about Delicious usage. Although it would be very handy to bookmark a webpage for easier access later on, I usually type the keywords in Google instead.
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  robsafuto

  11 months ago

  I bookmark a lot. One of my blogs is a news site on a particular topic. Most of the posts are inspired by the news items I find. I use Delicious as the place to archive those new items and share them on my site via a WordPress plugin that imports the feed to a special "news" page. Leo Laporte does something similar with TWiT.
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  ghina

  11 months ago

  I love delicious, because I bookmark obscure things not stuff I could get by googling. When I need to find something obscure I don't really want to spend the looking through 10s of pages to find that one peculiar thing. I'd rather rely on my own tag choices to do that.
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  JoeDuck

  11 months ago

  Indeed, bookmarking is so lamely 2007ish! For me the advantages of bumping into new stuff outweigh those of archiving most old stuff, so for most research or idle surfing I just keep on searching in new and different ways. Although tagging is very important I think it needs to be automatic to be of great global use - ie when smartphones start geotagging pix and they are pushed out we'll get some amazing results without any cumbersome human intervention. Tagging an interesting picture? $.01, auto tagging a million pictures per hour? Priceless.
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  xxdesmus

  11 months ago

  I won't lie - my collection of bookmarks is absurdly large, but that being said more often then not I end up just re-searching for a bookmark instead of trying to find it in my bookmarks. Kind of sad ain't it?
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  Michael Sherrin

  11 months ago

  I've always had problems with Delicious' design and it kept me from avidly using the service and so far the redesign has fixed a lot of things that kept me away from it. Alphabetical sorting, getting rid of the annoying orange popularity rank, and easier navigation. Any redesign is going to annoy current users (Facebook, I'm looking at you) but hopefully this design can bring some new people (like me) into the bookmarking fold.
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  Andrew Hillman

  11 months ago

  I use it but more for search than bookmarking. Its a lot more useful if looking for something specific.
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  Eric Rice

  11 months ago

  I tend to lose things I bookmark because I'm one of those that does go back. But that's not the point I wanted to make, the point I was thinking of is the issue of discovery. Seeking out information is one thing IF you know what you are looking for.
  
  I actually experience this more on YouTube (as recent as last night)... I'll see a 'related video' and it might use terms I've never thought to search for... or some newsworthy item that isn't something I'd normally read.
  
  Someone out there was talking about the evolution of newspapers to mobile-- a topic I found quite interesting, and I proceeded to explore it further, but the thing is-- I'd never have thought to put those two things together. Even though I understand mobile and I understand the evolution of print, the value for me was in the 'discovery' of those two topics combined.
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  novaspivack

  11 months ago

  You might want to check out Twine. We're taking the concept of bookmarking to a new place. Collecting a bookmark in Twine is really to teach Twine about your interests, and to inform others about things they might be interested in. We're building a semantic graph around this and then doing machine learning to make recommendations. Over time we want to be the best place for keeping up with what interests you. Bookmarks are a great way to learn, but that's just the beginning. We'll have delicious import very soon. So come on in and play with Twine. Yep -- still in beta -- not everything is there yet, but we're moving forward into new territory and it's gonna be fun.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Thanks, Nova -- I have signed up for Twine, but I guess I haven't gotten into the habit of using it, whereas Delicious is just something I'm used to using all the time. When Twine gets Delicious importing, I will definitely take another look.
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  Tim

  11 months ago

  Do you remember Mozilla Weave? You wrote about it last year and now it works pretty well! You even don`t need to bookmark, cause you just have to search your browsing history. And if you like to bookmark you just have to click at the firefox star.
  That`s pretty much what I´m waiting for for a long time!
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  Gareth

  11 months ago

  Delicious is at it's best as a search engine. It has much better results than google when I am looking for an app or method to do a specific task. The idea of a broad folksonomy is something that search will include eventually, at least as part of the algorithm.
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  Sérgio Nunes

  11 months ago

  Del.icio.us is not about the head of the long tail it is about the tail. Searching or remembering does not work for "low profile" items. Delicious has worked in the past and I see no change in the ecosystem for it to stop working.
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  nicoladagostino

  11 months ago

  Well, the search on delicious was really a sorry mess but slow and unable to cope with many bookmarks? Definitely not: for the record I have close to 10'000 of them (around 9800 right now) and it worked just fine.
  
  nda
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  Rob Hyndman

  11 months ago

  Holy crap, that's a lot of comments. You go, Mathew.
  
  I bookmark everything. Need a tshirt: "I'm bookmarking this". But I only revisit very 'specific needs' pages - restaurant listings, that kind of thing - info that generally would be hard to surface in a search without some time spent digging.
  
  I still bookmark the rest but I have no idea why. OCD? Perhaps there's a little Rainman in all of us.
  
  In any event, between restaurant reviews, books I want to read, and the like I actually return to delicious a lot. This probably sez more about Google than it does about Delicious.
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  Rob Hyndman

  11 months ago

  Just realized that no one who's commented so far has really spoken about the social aspects of bookmarking - maybe I missed something, but I don't think so. Hmmm.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Actually, a few people have mentioned that they like Delicious because they can search it for things that other people have shared -- I guess that's kind of social :-)
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  Alex Swanson

  11 months ago

  I usually just use delicious for making lists, like what places to visit on holiday, everything else i just google and count on google web history to remember it.
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  Mike Cane

  11 months ago

  I use FURL. I also curse FURL. Terrible search system. But things I put there are often the kid of stuff that has a short Net life, like news stories (especially from Yahoo News links!). It's been handy.
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  spaetzel

  11 months ago

  I used to use Delicious religiously, but since the release for Firefox 3, I've switched to using the built in bookmarks instead.
  
  I was primary using Delicious (via the FF plugin) to keep my bookmarks in sync between multiple computers, not for its social aspect. And by keeping my bookmarks in Delicious, I wasn't able to use the Firefox Awesomebar as much as I wanted to.
  
  I found a tool that lets me import my Delicious bookmarks into firefox and am now using Foxmarks to sync between computers. I haven't looked back since.
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  george

  11 months ago

  As an academic, I see bookmarking as similar to creating a bibliography. Everything I need is in one place and is searchable by my own terms (tags). I'm not doing it for posterity and I'm not even sharing them with people I know. They are there for me to not have to remember everything. I bookmark very sparingly, so the quality of bookmarks exceeds the quantity. I think I have maybe 400 bookmarks in three years.
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  Michael Camilleri

  11 months ago

  I guess I don't qualify as 'hard core' user (I only have 272). I use del.icio.us to bookmark two types of things: interesting things that I might want to refer back to at some point (http://delicious.com/pyrmont/design) and long-form articles I come across but at that moment don't have time to read (http://delicious.com/pyrmont/unread).
  
  The new del.icio.us redesign doesn't really impact upon either task so I'm happy insofar as they didn't break anything.
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  antje wilsch

  11 months ago

  There's a compliment Mathew, not only a reader for over a year, but one that remembers what you wrote about. Nice :)
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  You are totally right, Antje. Even I had forgotten about that one :-)
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  Dave Doll

  11 months ago

  Is it ironic if I bookmark this post?
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Perhaps a little, Dave, but I'd be flattered if you did :-)
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  lelapin

  11 months ago

  I would agree with you and... disagree at the same time. I guess ever since Del.icio.us hit the market other competitors emerged and, in time, several took their share in what del.icio.us could pretend once to have the monopoly. The reason is: there are several ways of bookmarking because there are as many intentions when one wants to save a link.
  The way I personally bookmark:
  1 - a site: Stumbleupon
  2 - an article, more specifically: Diigo (with our without addition of a sticky)
  3 - a content I want to retrieve and won't be certain to retrieve whenever I'll need it: Google notebook
  4 - an article I don't care to keep but want to share with others: Facebook this, Friendfeed this, Twine this, Tumblr this, etc. depending on whom it may best/most concern (friends, colleagues, business partners, people you only know from have friended them via various platforms, ...)
  5 - anything else (and sometimes redundant with a/m bookmarking facilities): del.icio.us. A word concerning the latter: Many a time I've found better quality infos (and faster too) using del.icio.us than merely googling for them.
  
  Many ways of bookmarking because what is ... bookmark-able is also very diverse.
  
  My 2 cts.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  Jeremy Wagstaff made a similar point in a post at his Loose Wire blog,
  and it's something I wish I had spent more time on in my post -- but
  now of course I don't have to :-)
  
  The word 'bookmark' used to mean just one type of activity, but now it
  can refer to dozens of different things, which we do for a host of
  different reasons.
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  Hashim Warren

  11 months ago

  This is why I use Google Desktop. Pages that I have visited show up at the top of my Google searches. I don't have to remember to bookmark anything or remember to search trough my bookmarks.
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  mathewi

  11 months ago

  That's a good point, Hashim -- I noticed that too with Google desktop
  and browsing history turned on. Very handy.
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  Brian

  11 months ago

  I really dig bonzobox.com instead of delicious 2.0....all visual and it allows you to do other functions beyond just bookmarking including a built in google search...for those of you who don't want to archive.
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  Ryan

  11 months ago

  The sharing features are incredibly useful for a team of say bloggers who pass links to one another in various contexts. As more old media migrates online and more pro blogging occurs I would expect this sort of use to increase. That said it's probably not enough for a mass business -- but does mean they could start charging if they wanted.
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  Carl@Brightrev

  11 months ago

  For me, giving up bookmarks assumes I can find any one of 10,000 different articles (using your numbers) by searching Google or "ask[ing] someone else." I'm pretty good at wielding the Google, but it would be silly of me to think I could find any one of 10,000 articles on Google without wasting a bunch of time. The idea is that I *can't* remember 10,000 things at once and don't want to waste time re-finding them, so I stash them in one spot so they're easier to find later.
  
  Found via Dwight Silverman
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  Bernard Devlin

  11 months ago

  Well, I seem to do things differently from everyone else. I don't bookmark anything, or use RSS, or Twitter, etc.
  
  Websites I visit often for content that changes daily, I remember the URL, or at worst I remember the keywords I use in Google to re-find that search. For stuff I have never looked up before, I Google. When I find something I want to keep, I cut and paste the entire page into Lotus Notes (or if it has linked files, I add them as attachments). This way I can categorize and tag the documents as I see fit, create links between them, and add my own addenda to the saved documents. Sometimes I don't remember how I categorized something, but since Notes has full-text indexing, I can find anything in a couple of seconds.
  
  I have a 4gb Notes database with local copies on my laptops, and they are replicated with my server. That way if a site ever goes away (and they do, and even www.archive.org doesn't necessarily have a copy), I have my own copy of the data. I've been doing it this way for about 7 years now. People might think this whole setup costs a lot - not at all. One can buy a Notes server license for a one-off cost of circa. $150 per user, and I host the server on linode.com ($20/month) - but since my interent connection costs me $40 a month, and my time is a lot more valuable I think my setup cannot be bettered. Since a Notes database can be rendered as HTML using its internal webserver, I can also make sure I have access to all that information from anywhere with a browser.
  
  Notes is a greatly under-rated tool.
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  Jim

  11 months ago

  Anytime I find something worth remembering I click the Tag button with the Firefox plugin and save it. Then I can move on to thinking about something else.
  
  Whenever I need to return a site, I go to delicious first, search my bookmarks and find what I was looking for instantly. Why wouldn't you bookmark?
  
  Typing in the keywords into Google is great, but many times the page where I found that really interesting bit of information is buried within the 3rd or 4th page.
  
  Lately I've been using a mix of Evernote (because of iPhone coolness) and Delcious. Anything private, or research material for a story I'm writing, etc. is saved to Evernote - clipping out the important parts. If I find an interesting link or page that I want to share with everyone I tag it in Delicious with a special tag that my blog reads in through an RSS feed.
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  thornley

  11 months ago

  Mathew, Thanks for the thoughtful post.
  
  Like you, I tag, tag, tag on del.ico.us. And I regularly use Search to find things I vaguely remember.
  
  However, I frequently use del.icio.us to find specific posts that were meaningful to me - even though they didn't rate high on Google.
  
  Del.icio.us let's us put the "I' in Search. Google is good for the "We."
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  imma

  11 months ago

  I tend to use the (possibly dubious) google toolbar for my bookmarks, so when i'm typing into my search box, the bookmarks autocomplete :)
  That's the only reason i tend to use them to go anywhere, though i do occasionally search them for stuff i've forgotten
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  Jeton

  10 months ago

  I can't make sense of "either remembering or searching".
  How can you remember things in this age, where content is exploding every second?
  
  Bookmarking had been around for a long time, not only in digital form, but in books and other items, and it will stay around for a long time.
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  cedorsett

  10 months ago

  I continue to Bookmark, but I am a blogger. The Delicious 2.0 release came at about the same time as a Mento.info release that made Mento less useful for my purposes, so for the first time in a while, I returned to Delicious to keep track of the stories that I am following so I can look back through them when i need to write a post. For that, Delicious is perfect. To discover new stories, I use Twine and Social Median.
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  millette

  10 months ago

  I like it, it's faster, search is way more powerful too. You can finally search in your network and search on URLs.
  
  Now I can't wait for the new open source federated magnolia :)
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  Kirk

  10 months ago

  Many people have pointed out the far more powerful and portable ways of keeping those really important bookmarks (for me, the bookmarks and history in Camino browser do the job fully). As a business, a shared del.icio.us account is great for us to have a central repository of things we've liked and are of note. We can pull a feed form those with a digest of each day and also feed the latest 3 stories onto our blog- a great way of showing things we've liked, pass a quick comment on them and also 'blog' them instantly....
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  Dan

  9 months ago

  Sorry, but this is just crazy talk. Bookmarking takes a second and comes in very useful about once a week when you're searching for something you need to finish an article or install a piece of software.
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  akbarrr

  8 months ago

  http://copilka.info
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  djuggler

  1 month ago

  I still use Delicious daily (even find myself typing del.icio.us). I'm at 8785 bookmarks and I use it as a research tool. I find that I reference it rather regularly. For instance, someone was looking for a different mind mapping tool and although they could search Google and find similar results, my delicious marks are pre-filtered to only show stuff that I consider valuable. For me, Delicious is like subsetting the large search engines.
  
  When I am researching, I can collect articles and websites without having to thoroughly analyze them. I simply tag them appropriately then after I've collected my sources, I can easily return to them in Delicious to more closely examine them and write my conclusion.
  
  I have asked the same questions. Of the 8785 bookmarks, many of the older ones are dead links (I wish Delicious would hide those. I don't want them removed because I can use them as a way to find the information in the wayback machine). Of the 8785 in all honesty, most of them I never return to give another look. But those few that I do, make the service and the habit well worth while to me.
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