Sims Learning Connections

This is a second installment in a series of tips for the software applications in my own personal learning (and doing) environment.

I’ve been a committed del.icio.us user for six months. During that time I briefly dabbled with other social bookmarking solutions including mag.nolia, Furl, and Fuzzy; however, I settled back on del.icio.us (for hopefully the long-term) and now have close to 1300 bookmarks and 1000 tags at del.icio.us/rsims.

First, a brief re-cap on “Why bother to use a social bookmarking application?” For me the compelling use cases are, the ability to:

1. Tag (and hence find) my bookmarks with multiple descriptors, versus being limited to a single folder hierarchy in traditional web browser bookmarking. No more “hmm, did I save that under ‘Learning’ or was that ‘Organizational Development’?”
2. Easily use tags for personal workflow management, such as in ‘BlogThis’ or ‘ReadLater’ (more on this in Part-2)
3. Discover popular, and hence usually valuable, content within particular topics (i.e. tags)
4. Both explicitly and implicitly share bookmarks with others that have similar interests. An explicit sharing example: “Let’s tag our content related to this conference as ‘XYZconference’ so we can easily find each other’s content” — while an example of implicit sharing is following what others in my social-bookmarking-defined network are tagging (largely people who I don’t know in any real sense.)
5. Use my bookmarks on any computer with an internet connection, i.e. bookmark portability.

Next regarding the Firefox browser extension: I only recently upgraded to the April-vintage significantly revised version, which is further described in del.icio.us’ blog announcement and quick tour. I’m trying to like it, but I come down on the side of advising others to approach this update with some caution. For me, negatives for the new pull-down from the ‘Search Your Bookmarks’ icon include:

1. It now takes me two clicks to get to the full user interface, one on the checkerboard icon and a second, after moving the cursor way down to the bottom of the pop-up, on my username (rsims). Worse, I can no longer use Crtrl-click to open the full interface as a new tab within Firefox. This is a significant ‘missing’ for me. (7 June update. I created a simple work-around: saving a new Firefox Toolbar bookmark for del.icio.us/rsims. Now I get my one-click back while still having the Tag applet word count advantages noted below.)
2. It displays all tags in all lower-case. Yes, this gives a nice clean modern look, but at the loss of readability and meaning for my tags like ‘iGoogle’ (displays as “igoogle’) and ‘BusinessIntelligenceJournal’ (displays as ‘businessintelligencejournal’.)
3. The user interface provides a yellow page icon to indicate that the bookmark has Notes; however, there is no way of viewing these Notes other than going to the full interface. Tip: the padlock icon, either by itself or on top of the page icon, indicates a ‘private’ (do not share) bookmark.
4. The narrow width highlights my inattention to bookmark Names (note: what was labeled as ‘Description’ in the previous release.) The visible first 4o characters are frequently too cryptic in my current Names, suggesting yet more time wasted to bookmark clean-up if I’m going to rectify this. This, combined with #3, is what drives me to the full interface anyway — so there is little real value in the pop-up contents for my usage pattern.
5. I like that the Search box now defaults to search my own bookmarks (the reverse of the full interface), but there is no way to search the full del.icio.us unless no results are found in own bookmarks — forcing me to jump over to the Firefox Search box anyway.

Fortunately I only have a couple of dozen Firefox bookmarks, which I use for the sites I access nearly daily; such as my own blog, the weather, and online banking. I allowed the extension update to import these into del.icio.us; however, this again created work for me as I had to sort out things like a Firefox Folder named ‘Ref’ (the short-hand used to save space in my Firefox toolbar) versus an earlier del.icio.us tag named ‘reference’ that contained some of the same bookmarks and many more.

If you have hundreds of Firefox bookmarks, think hard before biting off the import as you may be setting yourself up for lots of clean-up before you really gain the desire portability and the perceived “everything is in del.icio.us” advantage. Going forward I believe I’ll appreciate the manual “Also save to del.icio.us?” prompt, which appears when saving new Firefox bookmarks — as even when selecting ‘yes’ it prompts me to then think about is the data really as I desire for findability within del.icio.us?

Positives for the new ‘Add Bookmark’ pop-up:

1. A character counter for the 255 character limit on Notes. Previously I was forever inadvertently truncating my verbose descriptions (notes), which were typically cut-and-pasted from the bookmarked page’s text.
2. Support for Firefox Keywords that provide a quick jump to a particular bookmarked page, although personally I find no advantage as the items I would keyword are the bookmarks I already have at the root of my Firefox toolbar and are one-click versus any typing.

Another positive for me, as someone that uses bundles, is the bundle-view in the new toolbar. I like how the bookmarks associated with a tag within the bundle expand out upon mouse-over compared to the click that is required in the full interface. What I am not keen on, however, is yet another toolbar; I’d have preferred to see this functionality in the ‘Search Your Bookmarks’ pull-down. Another minor negative with the bundle implementation is that listing all bookmarks following the tags in the bundle pull-downs are just eye clutter for me as there are far too many to make any sense of and I already have the useful navigation above.

Bottom-line: for me, the new extension isn’t making my bookmark management and use any easier than what I already had in place. I wish del.icio.us had instead put their efforts towards making renaming tags and managing tags within bundles less cumbersome — now that would provide me some real value to me.

In part-2 I will cover my favorite del.icio.us tips; where the majority are applicable regardless of interface choose.

6 June 2007 addendum: For more regarding the learning context for social bookmarking, see Lee Kraus’ Social Bookmarking for Learning, also written on 5 June.