Wednesday, February 21, 2007

Using Del.icio.us to sift terribly useful bookmarks -- i.e., mine Not much blogging this week, while I've been putting more energy into sorting and tagging old bookmarks, using  del.icio.us. I'm experimenting with lots of overlapping tags or categories, including tags for courses that I teach and articles I've written. So, for instance, if students in my Online Journalism class, "Journalism & Electronic Media 222" want to see what bookmarks I think they might find useful, they can search de.licio.us for "JEM222," a tag that few, if any, other de.licio.us users are using. If they want to narrow the search even more, and only find bookmarks to pages I wrote myself and tagged for them, then they can search for jem222 and my last name. At the moment, my del.icio.us list has 622 bookmarks (not all public), 47 of them tagged for jem222, only five of which I wrote, most of which are also represented in the left rail of this blog. (Come to think of it, I ought to include authors' names on the tag lists for more of my bookmarks -- that way it would be easy to find things I've bookmarked by Mindy McAdams, Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer and other bloggers, scholars and online journalism gurus I read regularly.) Something the students may find even cooler: If you search for "jem222 -stepno" (with that minus sign) you'll subtract things I wrote from the search results, and get only the sites other people created (unless I forgot to put my name on some of my own stuff). I'm glad del.icio.us chose to use the minus sign for that kind of "... but not including" filter, since it's the same technique Google uses. I've been surprised by the number of students who haven't picked up on it as a way to search more efficiently. For instance, it's how I search Google News for "Knoxville" without getting "Johnny Knoxville" whenever he has a new movie in the entertainment news. (Put a minus sign right before his full name in quotes.) It may be UT heresy, but I use the same technique to eliminate football, basketball and other sports news from my local searches. Downside: Del.icio.us also offers the uncertainty of using a free online service for anything: When I went to test the links in this item after I posted it, del.icio.us itself was offline... and I had no way of knowing whether the dozen bookmarks I posted this morning were saved in time, or just disappeared "into the electricity," as an old Yale professor was told when he lost his first first word processor document 20-some years ago. (His book, "Writing with a Word Processor" probably has disappeared, too, unlike his other classics.) Update: Another downside of del.icio.us -- the name. I keep typing it as "de.licio..." That use of the ".us" domain is a cute gimmick, but confusing. Apologies to anyone who clicked on a non-functioning link the first time I posted this. They should all work now. Also, the del.icio.us glitch I mentioned only lasted a few minutes, and I had to re-post only one bookmark.) 10:36:44 AM    comment []

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