I'm a big fan of social bookmarking sites.
After playing around with a few, I finally settled on
Delicious; its simple interface and tagging options make it easy to use but powerful.
But what surprises me is how effective Delicious is for capturing other types of lists beyond bookmarks. Here are a few examples:
- Storing articles to read later using Readeroo - This simple Firefox plugin I wrote helps manage the flow of articles using the "toread" tag in Delicious.
- Storing books I'd like to read - I'll save the Amazon link to a book and tag it with "booktoread". I can then add other tags to partition the books by subject or genre.
- Storing music I'd like to listen to - Same concept as the list above, except for music, tagged with "musictoget". I also add the "rhapsody" tag to indicate whether I can listen to the album on Rhapsody.
The same method can be expanded to all sorts of lists, such as movies you want to see or a wishlist for Christmas. Any bit of info that's tied to a url open to be managed by Delicious, just pick a consistent tag and stick with it.
Personally, this is a revelation, since it allows me to centralize all those random lists scattered in text files and Access (yes, Access!). This is a crucial piece of
moving my life online.
I realize that tagging is nothing new, and none of this is revolutionary. But I find it interesting that such a simple concept can be "overloaded" to represent different types of data within the same system. In this case the tags go beyond mere categorization to build a personal "
Database of Intentions".
Comments (4)
Great insight... I'm often frustrated by eMusic's crummy 'save for later' list system, and this post reminded me that I could be using delicious for that purpose!
and dude... ACCESS??!??!?
Not to add more overload, but I've been using Listal (or use my blatant referrer) for Movies, DVDs, Books, and Music. It's taggable and a little more visual than bookmarking alone, and there are links to Amazon and IMDB.
I like the idea of the DB of Intentions, but I feel like I'd add too much without checking enough off. :)
Oh, and seconded on Access. Urgh.
my list of books i'd like to read has grown to the the point where i can't possibly finish it in this lifetime. i wonder if delicious accounts carry over into the next life?