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Last week we discussed a variety of social media tools. For any of you who know me, I have been a huge advocate of a variety of tools. Often shouting about them vigorously from the rooftops of every platform (well only most of them).
One of my all time most useful is delicious. However, admittedly, I find myself not using it as much outside of classes. I have a few theories about that..
1) Bookmarks are now sharable. Most browsers now share bookmarks between them, permitting a pro-user such as myself to find the same bookmarks regardless of browser.
2) Bookmarks are easy to return to. Google has someone interfered with the need to have an online bookmark repository. With the ability to retrieve almost any relevant search result, the need for site and tools like delicious is minimized. Not like the old days, where either you wrote it down or it was LOST forever.
3) Tagging is still not as familiar as folders. While the world has moved into using tags instead of the taxonomies of old, tagging is still presents a bit of a quandary. Like, how did I tag that link, is this for video, or audio, or did I tag it creative. And what if I need 2 words, did I use a hyphen or a underline? Without a tagging policy or strategy if you will, you will still not find your links.
4) Delicious is not friendly. Delicious doesn’t provide a whole host of easy tools to integrate it into your life. Sure there are some developers out there, making widgets, gadgets and the like. And of course you can add a bookmark while on Mars, but the aggregation of links to a website or across a tag, still requires programming. So, less Delicious users have these nice widgets proudly displayed for all to see on their sites.
5) Delicious descriptions. So what are these for, and how do you craft them. Is this a synopsis, an abstract. How deeply do I have to comment this fella for it to be recognizable. I’m still not sure these comments help, but the box is there.
So, there you have it. Lots of reasons not to use online bookmarking in your everyday life. And truthfully, only one really compelling reason to do so.
Sharing. How else can you show the world the things you read and see and find interesting. Well I guess you go through the world until you have that Ah-Ha moment. One day my colleague comes to work after a night of ‘StumbledUpon’ and professes his love of this or that website. Then I say to him, well send it to me. And he says, well I didn’t save it. I just read it. What! I say, why don’t you use Delicious? Hmm.. He says. I guess I never thought of that.
Perhaps that is the point. If you have Delicious you don’t have to think of it, because the SHARING part is taken care of. For you and all your friends out there looking at that awesome website, together.
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April 14, 2010 at 11:32 am
I’m still not completely sold on Delicious. I find myself, under the pressure of social media overload, to regress from it and limit myself to only certain sites on a regular basis– for me its primarily facebook and a blog or two. Do you think there’s a limit to how much following and sharing through multiple websites one can do, before the whole social media model implodes? I mean, if I’m already following person a, b, and c’s blog, checking up on my facebook/twitter feed etc, why should I care what website’s my network is visiting?
April 15, 2010 at 10:55 am
Dena..
I think like anything else in today’s society, even social media can result in a kind of gluttony. In response to this overabundance, I think we take a step back, and assess what we need. For professionals, how do we leverage this technology to best benefit our business goals? On a personal level, what is it that I need to do (or want to do) to stay in contact with my friends? We look through our roles and decide basically, which social media performance suits us best in that role; and take a bite of no more, no less.
I turn down at least 5 requests a week for the latest hot ’social media’ thing. And I will keep doing so, until a compelling reason, has me join this or that social bandwagon. Hopefully, this class will give you some exposure to the ones I have found most helpful in my many roles. And if not, simply abandon them at the conclusion or the course.