Another excellent day at OSBC, which I’ll get to whenever I get the chance. Given that I’ve got to hop a plane in about a half hour, only to turn around a couple of hours later and head back out that might be a while, but I wanted to relate a couple of quick anecdotes that I discussed last night. As many of you know, I’m a big fan of Josh Schachter’s del.icio.us service, and as of a couple of seconds ago I’ve stored nearly 2500 bookmarks in the service. Despite the service’s popularity, I still have a lot of people question me in just how I use it, and how – precisely – I find it useful. So two quick stories.
- The first anecdote was related to me by a Friend of RedMonk (who should feel free to reveal themself if they choose). While browsing one day, I came across a link I thought this person and/or their colleagues should be aware of, so I tagged it in del.icio.us with a note to that person. Somewhat coincidentally, this person happened to be demoing del.icio.us to a business associate, and after pulling up one of the keywords I used the link was returned as one of the top few results along with the message to that person. In other words, it’s a quick, easy way to collaborate in a more permanent fashion than email.
- More interesting, perhaps, was how I used to it to help prepare for my Zend talk. Knowing that I was going to be talking about simplicity and less code, I tagged items as I ran across them well in advance. Then, when it came time to put together the presentation, I simplicity visited my del.icio.us links for simplicity and less code, and voila – I had everything from the AK-47 to the bug story all neatly linked in one place. Was a hell of a lot easier than a.) trying to remember what I wanted to talk about and b.) trying to hunt it down again. Plus, it’s far more natural and sustainable a process than taking presentation specific notes.
So while these examples are relatively simple, I thought they might give a few of you an indication of just how you might be able to use del.icio.us. Enjoy.
getvendors says:
November 3, 2005 at 12:42 pm
Stephen you have raised the valid point. I always wonder, the full potential of del.icio.us is not tapped. All the old age “refer a page to friend” etc. utilities can be very poweful through the model of sharing bookmarks. These folks needs to take a page from flickr’s marketing book and start supporting developer community around this. That way many value added and “cool” applications will be developed and the use will be very commonplace..right now the status is “great utility” but you have to be smart and creative in using it effectively..let the onus pass on to smart developers..
stephen o'grady says:
November 9, 2005 at 12:17 pm
getvendors: there are actually some pretty cool del.icio.us extensions floating around – notably some firefox extensions or things like extisp.icio.us and del.icio.us director, but you’re right – they could all be more accessible to the mainstream user.
i’m not sure, however, how much value del.icio.us will ever have to the mainstream user. be interesting to watch.
Claire Giordano says:
November 12, 2005 at 12:23 am
Yes, I’m the Friend of RedMonk in Section 1 of this post. 🙂 I finally blogged the story; it can be found here:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/cmh?entry=communicating_with_del_icio_us
And I know you know that, since you’ve already bookmarked my post via del.icio.us. 🙂 (As has James, the new convert…)
ClaireG