I was having a think about del.icio.us last night, mostly because my bookmarks are in such bad shape, and sorely need maintaining. I was thinking about the different ways that people use it, and how it isn’t really actually working for me at the moment, and what I can do to change that.

My account is a terrible shambles. I’ve had it since Dec 2005, and I’ve now got something in excess of 600 items bookmarked, but I’m just not happy with the way I’m using it. I use it more as a surrogate for a traditional browser based bookmarking system (which it is obviously very useful for) and less for keeping track of articles and posts that I’d like to remember or read later (which I’d like to use it for). I’m finding it very hard to change my usage of it, mostly because my tagging is so awful. I have far too many tags, and in the system as it stands, it’s more or less impossible to edit them effectively.

I keep meaning open another account to keep track of all my bookmarks for work, but I keep hesitating, mostly because I know how easy it is to let it all spiral out of control. Do any of you use it for work/professional bookmarking? If so, do you have a better way of keeping it neat and tidy, or have you found that it tends to get messy fast?

I’m anxiously waiting for the beta to become public (there’s a preview of it on Techcrunch). Del.icio.us is such a good service, and very web 2.0 at heart, but it’s no way near as user friendly as it should be, which is a shame.

Only vaguely relatedly, but all the Facebooking law librarians out there should be part of Lo-Fi’s new group ‘UK Law Librarians for Publisher’s RSS Feeds’. We’re going to take on the man and hopefully try and convince the UK legal publishers that it’s in their and our best interests to start publishing this material as RSS. So much easier, so much more current and timely, and so much paper saved from the wastebasket. It’s win-win people. (Also, in the interim, do check out Nick Holmes homebrewed version. He’s a star for putting this together)

While I’m griping about web 2.0 products that are less than spectacular in some areas – why is the groups function in Facebook so poor? I tend to forget that groups exist because there isn’t (unless I’m not looking hard enough) a way of being notified when there are changes to a group. Which is a shame, because obviously social interaction is at the heart of Facebook, and not being able to interact effectively with the groups that you’re involved in is just disappointing.

Related posts:

1. Facebook