Thing #10

I think I'm starting to realize why I have been so classically behind on this process. Part of it is my natural late and disorganized nature, and that's kind of obvious. The new realization, though, is the fact that I've done a lot of my own exploring of a lot of these Things, so I'm not as passionate about doing this process as I might have been a year or two ago when I started down the path.

So del.icio.us, for example. I think I started using it in 2006 for my own bookmarks, and then developed an account just for collecting and tagging legal research bookmarks for my Advanced Legal Research class. I love social bookmarking, I have to admit. My del.icio.us accounts are elizout and levin_ALR, if you want to check them out.

There are several reasons I love this process. One is just the ability to save and organize web resources. I am very good at seeing something mindblowing on the web that I want to come back to later, and then never remembering how I got there. With a bookmarking site like del.icio.us, I don't have to remember. I can just save it in there for later. The tags are another reason -- the fact that I can organize them how I want to, creating my own categories, is great. The social nature of the tags is even better. Once I see that a tag is in use, for something that I'm interested in, I can click the link and see what everyone else has saved with that tag. Thus finding more cool stuff. The other great aspect of the social connection is that when I see that other people have bookmarked a site, I can see who they are and look at their links, thus finding more cool stuff. I love it, it works great for me.

Now that I've read The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users, I've learned at least one thing that I'm not doing, which is using the inbox. I'm definitely going to set that up.

However, I have tried some other tools that I tend to use more now for my work-related bookmarking. They enable more organization of your bookmarks, and more ways to connect with other users. Connotea is a good one that I have used. So is Diigo, which is the one I probably use the most lately. Diigo has interesting additional features if you install the toolbar -- it lets you highlight and put sticky notes on web pages, so that you're essentially annotating the web. And anyone else who has Diigo installed in their browser can see your annotations. It's fascinating.