Lest you be confused, this isn’t a column about graffiti—virtual, digital or otherwise. If you read my last column, you know I’m struggling with a way to keep track of things I’ve found online in a way that makes it easy to find them again.
“Tagging” is the best way (so far) to deal with this problem. Browser bookmarks are fine if you have a handful of sites you regularly visit, and RSS is a great way to follow tens or hundreds of sites efficiently. But what happens when you find a nugget of information and want to keep it? What if you have hundreds or thousands of such nuggets?
In the past, you’d print out the page, tuck it into a file folder for “recipes” or “funny pictures” and that would be that. Retrieving the information was a little tedious, though, flipping through all the recipes looking for a particular chicken dish. And if you wanted to file the same item in two (or more) folders, you needed to make as many copies. Thus, any annotations made to a recipe could end up missing on one or more copies.
Tagging lets you assign multiple tags (think of them as file folder labels) to a given piece of information. So a recipe could be associated with the tags “recipes,” “dinner” and “chicken.” You can make up tags that make sense to you—there’s no preordained classification system or hierarchy of terms. Best of all, recovering information is a lot easier, since you can get all items filed under one or more tags simultaneously.
The best known tagging solution is a site called Delicious, which started out as the quirky del.icio.us and was later acquired by Yahoo! as it sought to add “social” to its offerings.
Delicious not only lets you tag things, it shows you what other people are tagging (hence the name “social bookmarking”). For example, if you’re looking for information on “scleroderma” (a degenerative tissue disease), you can see a list of all the Web pages people have tagged with that word. Better still, you can drill down into that list using other tags, like “treatment” or “resources.” This makes Delicious a search engine of sorts, with the benefit of human input. Unfortunately, there’s no “voting” to distinguish the quality of links (as you’ll find on some other sites). But it can be a useful tool when the sheer volume of Google search results is overwhelming.
If you save an article (which you can do without specifying any tags) on Delicious, it will show you how other people (if any) have tagged the same item. This can be helpful when you’re first developing your own personal system.
The best way to use Delicious is with a “bookmarklet” (a little piece of code you install into your browser by dragging it to your browser’s toolbar)—it’s an active bookmark, if you will. When you’re on a page you want to save, click on the bookmarklet and up pops a dialog box asking for the title, URL, tags and notes. The title and URL are prefilled from the page. You can add tags (“recommended tags” are right there for you to work with) and any notes you care to make. Both of these items are optional (and you can edit them later on your Delicious page). Two clicks (one to click the bookmarklet, one to click Save) are all it takes. You also have the option to mark any link you tag as “private,” which is good for, say, researching competitive information.
If you want to save links, you have to create a (free) Delicious account. But if you only want to search, you won’t need one. If you already have an ID from Yahoo!, Google or Facebook, you can use one of those instead. So, create an account, drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and start tagging those bits of information you find on the Web.
Of course, like all Web-based services, you need to worry (a little, at least) about what happens to your information, right? And that’s where Delicious hit a bit of a snag early this year. It showed up on a leaked internal presentation from Yahoo!, which showed Delicious as a service to be “sunsetted” (discontinued). All of a sudden, Delicious users were faced with the problem of their links disappearing!
One good thing is that Delicious lets you export your saved links, along with their associated tags and notes, as an HTML file. And here’s an important lesson for any Web-based service you may use: Be sure you can get the data you put into it back out of it.
Although it’s unlikely Delicious will suddenly disappear, the news of its potential demise caused a sudden rush of interest in competing services. The big beneficiary of this uncertainty was Pinboard (www.pinboard.in—not .com). Probably the most significant difference between Delicious and Pinboard is that Pinboard is a paid service, while Delicious is free. It doesn’t cost much, though: A one-time fee of $9.22 is all, which is quite reasonable if you really want to switch from Delicious.
Pinboard even publishes a list of reasons you might (and might not) want to switch from Delicious. It jokingly refers to itself as “anti-social bookmarking,” although it still lets you share your tagged links (or not). You can set it up so your saved links are private by default, a feature Delicious lacks. On the other hand, Pinboard doesn’t offer some of the features that Delicious does, nor as “fancy” a user interface. So, they’re both worth a look if you use the Web to find and bookmark useful information.
Any Web-based service can go out of business, taking your data with it. Companies may decide to discontinue their service (the imminent demise of Bloglines was the topic of my last column). If you rely on a Web service, make sure it provides a straightforward way to export/backup your data—and that you actually use it.
Michael E. Duffy is an experienced and successful startup technologist, and is always on the lookout for The Next Big Thing. His personal website is www.mikeduffy.com.
