weblog.masukomi.org

Why social bookmarking really isn’t the wrong tool October 24, 2007

Phillip Keller has 5 reasons he thinks bookmarking sites are the wrong tool when it
comes to helping you recall valuable information:

1. You can’t forsee the future.
2. You tear links out of it’s context.
3. It takes too much time.
4. It didn’t work for [Phillip]
5. Social bookmarking won’t improve that soon.

I think he’s going about it all wrong, and here’s why:

1) Phillip suggests that “Deciding which web site will be valuable in the future
is a very very hard task.” and he’s totally right, but it’s also the wrong task
to be attempting. The question you need to ask is not “will it be valuable in
the future”. The question you need to ask is “Do I consider this
interesting/useful right now?” I haven’t a clue if it’ll be useful in the
future but
I
bookmark everything I find interesting “right now”.

Phillip also “…can’t decide how [he] should tag (categorize) [his] bookmarks.”
The answer is “simply”.
He’s
got 3000+ tags for 3444+ bookmarks. With tags like “alter” and “100″ and
“base”… when the fuck are you going to say “oh hey, I need a page about /
having to do with “alter” or “100″?! You’re not. Even something notable like
“bbc” is useless unless it’s actually an article about the bbc, but it his case
they’re just articles that happen to be on the bbc site. One about the
first face transplant he’s tagged with
“health
face
transplant
medicine
science
news
bbc
via:slashdot”
Which seem like useful things except they’re terrible for recall.

• “health”… this isn’t an article about “health”.
• “news”… seriously, do you know how effing large and useless that category
  would be if you tagged all the news you found interesting with it? And
  you’re not going to go “ohh i need an article about news”.
• “transplant” would be useful if you were a doctor tagging a bunch of
  different surgical procedures. But as a non-doctor you’re just going to end
  up with one or two items there which means it’s too narrow of a category.
• “medicine” this one is good. It’s an article related to medicine, in the
  broader sense of the word. “medical” might be a better choice though.
• “face” … again way too narrow.
• “via:slashdot”… yes you may recall it as something you saw mentioned on
  slashdot but you’re never going to go looking for “something i found on
  slashdot”.. you’re going to look for “that surgery thing…. i found on
  slashdot”  which means that what you really need is a “surgery” (or
  “medical”) bookmark. This just doesn’t help, and it especially doesn’t help
  other people going through your bookmarks.

Tags that are too narrow leave you with too many items you need to browse
through in your list of tags. Tags that are too large don’t help much, unless
combined with other tags. For example I tag a lot of things with “software”
which is broad, but not huge. I’m never going to use “software” by itself
because it’ll get me too many results but i will use “software+osx” when I’m
looking for a mac app I’ve bookmarked. If i really want to narrow it down i can
say “software+osx+writing” and find all the mac software to facilitate writing.

If you’re spending any time thinking about what bookmarks to use it means
you’re going to have to spend time thinking about what bookmarks you
might have been thinking about when you chose tags for that thing you want. If
you can’t remember the page well enough to grab it quickly in google how the
hell do you expect to remember what you were thinking about when bookmarking that
thing you can’t remember. Pick brain-dead stupid tags that require no thought to
recall. Inkscape isn’t “vector illustration svg” no. What is it? “software” What
does it do? It makes “graphics”. If you’re like me and use 3 operating systems
then knowing what it’ll run on is important too so it’s also “osx windows
linux”. None of these require thought. When I need “that cool open source app
vector illustration app” I don’t have to think because any moron could figure
out that it’s “software” + “graphics”  and if I actually want to install it
right now I’ll add what OS i happen to be on.
http://del.icio.us/masukomi/software+graphics+osx 
Even though those are all broad and simplistic tags their combination gets me a
list of only 7 items, one of which is
Inkscape.

2) You tear links out of it’s context. He’s referring to the descriptive snippet
you associate with a link. And if that was the end of it that would be true.
Except it isn’t. Del.icio.us doesn’t just index your descriptions for searching
it also indexes the pages you linked to. So you can search for a concept /
keyword was on one of the pages that you bookmarked but wasn’t in the
descriptive text. And yes, the search on del.icio.us is painfully slow but it’s
pretty speedy in the beta for the upcoming version, but that could just be
because there’s hardly anyone using it.

3) “It takes too much time” That’s something that can only be determined on a
person by person basis, but I look at it this way. Even if it takes me ten
seconds to bookmark something, and I never use it again, how much time to I save
by having important reference information quickly available? 
Especially  since the really good ones seem to unfindable on google when
you really need them. I find the time saved far outweighs the time spent
bookmarking things i don’t use later. AND that’s ignoring the fact that they may
be useful for friends of mine with similar reference needs who know i bookmark
everything interesting.

4)”It didn’t work for Phillip” A great reason for him to not use it but not one
that means it’s the wrong tool, just not a tool that necessarily works with his thinking patterns.

5)Whether or not Social Bookmarking improves any time soon is irrelevant to the
question of is it the wrong tool now. And I say that it isn’t IF you know how to use it.

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