Sims Learning Connections

Continuing from Part-1, some del.icio.us tips and possibilities to consider…

Regarding bookmarking in general:

1. Brazenly bookmark any URL you think you might have any need to go back to in future. With this, especially tag deep pages and individual blog posts as these are the ones that can be challenging to re-find even using internet or site-specific search (reference: my original aha moment on this.)
2. Also, brazenly tag each bookmark. Err towards more tags, not fewer. If you at all think the tag term may help you find the content in the future, use it.
3. That said, settle on your own tag vocabulary and watch out for creating derivatives. Long before I got into social bookmarking, Nick Santilli at The Apple Blog made this point well with:
   

   … decide on the vocabulary you’re going to use. STICK TO IT. Pluralize your tags or DON’T. Use descriptive verbs, or just basic nouns. However you decide to use your tags, stick to a system so you don’t end up with a bunch of one-offs. (pic, pictures, photo, photos, photograph, photography.)

   I’ve fairly arbitrarily settled on:

• The plural form. For example: articles, blogs, books, conferences, magazines, papers, publications, surveys, etc.
• Using underscores for people names (e.g. Ray_Sims) and multi-word concepts (e.g. informal_learning, instructional_design). Just in writing this article I have gotten more consistent about this, in part due to the new Firefox attention displaying as all lower-case.
• Reserving the use of capitals to proper names (people, companies, software, etc.) and using all lower-case for concepts (e.g. data_warehouse)

These conventions not only reduce inadvertently creating derivatives, but they also speed periodic tag clean-up, making it easier to absorb intended use and meaning. Note to self: revisit “metadata” and tagging best practice as defined by information management professionals and organizations such as ASIS&T.

Regarding using the del.icio.us bookmark applet:

1. Liberally (within the 255 character limit) use Notes, although keep in mind that if you share the bookmark (i.e. do not select ‘do not share’) that the Notes are available to everyone. Notes will both help you re-find content and are also a service to others; for example, for the content author to understand what readers see as the key-point, or for other potential readers to evaluate whether to click on the link for a look at the content.
2. Highlight text in the content that you’d like to use in Notes prior to clicking on ‘Tag’ to pre-populate in the Notes field, saving a couple of mouse-clicks compared to a later cut-and-paste.
3. Pause to actually read the pre-populated bookmark Name (formerly labeled Description) and edit it if not maximally meaningful, or if it contains extraneous text. I am still developing this discipline as I find that many of my bookmarks have fairly cryptic names, which imped efficient re-finding. For the aspiring perfectionists, consider adopting a standard of ‘title’ followed by ’source’. This is the order that WordPress blogs seem to default to whereas e.g. Blogger is the reverse.
4. Depend on your own tags (the ones that appear in the drop-down from the Tags field as you start to type) more than on ‘Popular’ or ‘Recommended’ tags. Trust your own vocabulary and how you would re-find. This is a counterpoint to the “brazenly tag” above. Allowing the applet to suggest your own tags based on the first few letters you type will again reduce the number of derivative tags (e.g. an ‘-ing’ form of the term sneaking in.)
5. If you’ve created a del.icio.us network (more about this below), you’ll see a heading for ‘Network tags:’ and a series of ‘for:username’ links for each person in your network. Click on one of these and your bookmark appears in the ‘links for you’ in their del.icio.us home page. Full disclosure: I haven’t used this yet and nobody else as done this “to” me either. Additionally, recent posts on the ydn-delicious@yahoogroups.com mailing list indicate some emerging concern regarding spamming. Grrr, I hope this concern can be resolved as this does seem like a potentially useful approach to share targeted bookmarks with those that you have some form of existing network relationship with — not unlike an email with the link and a note saying “thought you’d find this interesting.”

Tips and ideas related to some popular use cases:

1. Search bookmarks saved by others. The del.icio.us search indexes all data, including Notes. This can be a good thing; however, I continue to find searches to be very slow and typically return far too many results. Therefore, when diving into a new subject area (reference page 2 in PLE workflow PDF), better to manually enter the URL ‘http://del.icio.us/popular/[tagname]‘ where [tagname] is your desired topic. For example, relevant to this post, try http://del.icio.us/popular/del.icio.us . In your initial exploration, try several possible tags for the same meaning. For example, ‘BI’ provides more useful content than ‘business_intelligence’. This discovery may influence the tag you might want to commit to for your own tagging on the subject (the one already used more by others.) Then, once you have followed a subject for awhile, you may want to switch to ‘http://del.icio.us/tag/[tagname]‘, which returns all bookmarks with the desired [tagname], and use the RSS feed for that page.
2. Use workflow oriented tags. As mentioned in Part-1, del.icio.us is handy for creating queues for your own work using tags such as ‘ReadLater’ or ‘BlogThis’. Then as part of your daily or weekly review you can click on these tags for task reminders.
3. Tag your own content. For example, tag your own blog posts to then later use as an indicator of content popularity (reference my post in April and Tony Karrer’s pick-up.) I’ve also found this to be a useful way to identify other users for your del.icio.us network — those that tag your content are (duh!) people with similar interests to your own. I’ve recently also started to tag pages that link to mine using the tag ‘LinkLove‘, which then facilitates finding way back to these to follow comments. Speaking of comments, I’m also going to give a try using a ‘MyComments‘ tag for pages that I leave comments on, to again facilitate further monitoring of the conversation.
4. Build your del.icio.us network. Click on the ‘your network’ link in the upper-left and then add user names via the ‘add’ box on the network page upper-right. Once you’ve added other users, in future you’ll see the latest bookmarks from your network members. I occasionally (yet another task in my weekly review) glance through these and have found some useful content that I likely would have otherwise missed via following blogs and search alerts, which are my other primary content sensors.
5. Use ‘via:[user or person name]‘ to credit your most valuable sources. This from May 10th Web Worker Daily:
   

   In many parts of the blogosphere, noting where you got a link is almost as important as the link itself — because it shows who did the work in surfacing useful stuff. These days, we need to not only know what to look at right now but who to look to in the future to find what else we should be paying attention to.

   While the for: tag is well known among delicious users (and specifically supported by delicious), some delicious users use the via: tag to track who provided a link. That allows people browsing your links to know who else they might want to add to their network on del.icio.us.

   I just adopted this practice for particularly valuable pointers from others.

6. Bundle tags. Bundles are groups of related tags as in a folder — and a particular tag may reside in more than one Bundle. This speeds navigation through tags compared to a flat-list of, in my case, hundreds of tags. Full disclosure: others have found the trouble not worth the bother. For more help with bundling, refer to screen-shots in Sue Waters’ wiki and the maintenance tip in the Web Worker Daily tips mentioned above.

Lastly, regardless of if you Bundle or not, periodically spend some time doing tag clean-up. Everyone who is serious about sharing and re-finding content faces this and nobody enjoys it (reference for example Dave Lee’s recent lament.) Yes, you guessed it, this task is yet another prompt on my weekly review checklist.

Additional Resources:

• The official del.icio.us blog — not very active
• The official community mailing list — insightful for developers or aspiring power users
• Sue Waters’ del.icio.us wiki page — recommended for the new user
• Quick Online Tips’ Absolutely Del.icio.us Tools Collection — an amazingly lengthy list of tools associated with del.icio.us. I’ve assigned myself a low-priority task to explore further.