Not About Music...but Social Bookmarking!

For a project at school, I was assigned to profile the social bookmarking site delicious.com. In order to get the full feel of delicious and understand it completely for my project, I decided to "join" the site and add the toolbar. It was pretty easy to download the toolbar, but that was where delicious stopped being easy for me. When I opened my browser back up, it had asked me if I wanted to import my existing bookmarks, I said yes (I only had a few), and it did so, but it also added random sites I had only recently visited once or twice. I thought it would be easy to delete these bookmarks with my toolbar, but that was incredibly confusing too! I have to admit I was not keen on the idea of joining a social bookmarking site, and this only made it worse. It was too frustrating to figure out how to add the bookmarks I really wanted to have and navigate the toolbar, so I deleted it! I probably gave up too easily, but I'd rather just enter in the URL myself, it is a lot less complicated then having a to have ANOTHER unique username/password and toolbar.

I thought that my days of social bookmarking were over, but then I found out we had to use ANOTHER social bookmarking site, diigo.com! You could imagine my frustration! But what delicious lacks in it's home site and toolbar, diigo more than makes up for. The toolbar is so simple almost anyone could use it. All of the buttons are very self explanatory, and can perform a variety of functions: bookmark (of course), highlight, send to twitter or facebook, organize into "recent" and "unread" files, etc.

With diigo, you can network and join a group and share bookmarks with them and write notes on the pages that only they can see. It's also really easy to find bookmarks in a variety of fields. For example I typed in "Music" and got a bunch of really good music sites that were bookmarked and tagged "music" by other people like, last.fm (one of my favorite and most frequently visited sites), pandora, allmusic, pitchfork, etc.

Now, I do not know for sure if I will continue to use social bookmarking sites after this class and into the future (most of my favorite sites' URL's are already burned into my brain), but it is nice to know that I at least have one easy to use site to pick if I decide I need a bookmarking site. My experience is one example of why you shouldn't let "new" technologies and methods scare you, they just might become a necessity in the future!