Del.icio.us, Facebook, RSS - a bit of a ramble

Posted by Jennifer on October 30th, 2007

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.

Tags: , , ,

Related posts

5 Comments »

Gotta start somewhere

Posted by hypatia on March 10th, 2007

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about web 2.0 technologies, and how to go about implementing them in the library. Particularly, implementing them in the law library – traditionally one of the hardest places to get any sort of new idea off the ground. My immediate co-workers and I are all really quite keen about the idea, but there’s not much institutional support, and not likely to be any time in the forseeable future. But we want to get something started, and I think that starting from within the library is the best way to go.

We’re not going to beable to convince partners and lawyers to buy expensive enterprise level rss programs, we’re not going to be able to force our budgetaround expensive aggregated search tools that would let us create rss feeds of our current awareness. But we can start small and local.

We don’t need to have a staff training manual – we can have a team wiki instead, where we add information that we think is important, and we can all add and edit and play away with it to our hearts content. And it’s not tied to a file that might get lost or corrupted. It’s not all trapped in one of our heads. It’s online and searchable and there tomorrow should a colleague decide to move to Guatamala (or whatever) and take their harddrive with them, and we were to suddenly find ourselves with an information shortage that we have no way of fixing. (Peanut Butter Wiki and WikiSpaces are good examples of free web-based wikis that you can start as easily as a blogger account).

A shared del.icio.us account is a much easier way of sharing links and online resources and all those little important tidbits of information that any team is constantly emailing to one another. Why search back through outlook emails (and I don’t know about you, but my work gets kinda cranky when the inbox size starts creeping up and up and up) when you can post them all to del.icio.us and find them again much more easily. And, again, no information is trapped with any particular individual. That’s the joy of this sort of technology - shared information is the way of the future (I know I’m preaching to the converted here, but still).

These will both take time to set up, and will probably take up more time for us than the equivilant tasks currently, but once their in place, then they’re there, and the infrastructure is in place to continue sharing, learning and collaborating our knowledge.

Once we know how it works, and have been using it in our day to day jobs, getting stuff done with it, seeing how much better it makes our working life, and how much easier collaboration and sharing is this way, then, maybe, we can think about making a business case for it. It’s gonna be a while til the law community catches on (sadly, it’s just the nature of the industry). But that’s no reason not to start using it where we can.

Tags: , , , ,

Related posts

4 Comments »