Social bookmarking is delicious

The most practically useful thing on the whole entire social web is Delicious. Its original point was to store your web browser bookmarks online. That’s reason enough to use it. But the real value of Delicious is how it connects the thoughts in your head to the thoughts in the heads of innumerable internet strangers. Even more useful is the way it stores, reorganizes and reflects your own thoughts back to you. Delicious feels less like a web site I look at and more like a new module of my brain. It’s also like a slow-paced but highly absorbing text-based computer game, a loosely organized internet scavenger hunt.

Why is storing your bookmarks online such a good idea?

Having your bookmarks online makes them accessible from any computer. There’s also the added insurance against something bad happening to your computer, like spilling coffee into it twice in a month, like I did. That’s well and good, but it’s only the tip of the Delicious iceberg. I mean, there are plenty of ways to back up your bookmarks online. Why, I get asked a lot, do I want the whole world looking at my bookmarks? I get something very powerful in return, getting to look at everybody else’s bookmarks. More importantly, I can see how everyone else sorts and annotates their stuff.

Tagging is the best way to organize knowledge

If, like I have, you embark on a major internet research project or three, you quickly amass an enormous number of bookmarks. Keeping them all sorted is the only way to make them useful. The problem with conventional bookmarking is the problem with most computer ontologies. Everything has to go in a particular folder or subfolder, meaning it can’t go in any of the other folders. This unambiguous hierarchical tree is well-suited to the way the computer stores data, but it’s not well-suited to the way your brain works.

The human brain works by creating associations between ideas. Given a word, we can effortlessly free-associate from it, connecting memories, experiential knowledge, words that meaninglessly rhyme, and so on. We don’t do so well memorizing rigid binary sorting systems, even if we ourselves were the ones who set them up.

This isn’t just an intellectual limitation on our part. Designing rigid categories is a maddening process because there are always exceptions to any category, or items that belong in many categories, or items that seemingly belong to no category at all. It only gets worse when you have an elaborate recursive tree of folders within folders within folders to contend with. Information in the brain is made of associative networks with a high-dimensional, multiply-connected topology. It’s impossible to impose tree structures on our thoughts without losing a lot of valuable connections. What you really want is for a multiply-connected network-shaped filing system to spontaneously and flexibly emerge from its contents.

Delicious doesn’t sort your knowledge for you, but it comes closer than any other information-tracking system I’ve used, on the computer or off. To heck with the Dewey Decimal System. Instead of exclusive folders, Delicious has you describe each bookmark with a list of tags. For me, coming up with tags is a delightful little free-associative writing exercise in and of itself. If the page you’re bookmarking has been bookmarked by someone else, and it probably has, Delicious shows you the tags that person used used. If a whole bunch of people have bookmarked it, then it shows you the most commonly used tags. You can select the ones that suit your particular mental filing system and ignore the others.

So for instance, there’s a blog called Cute Otters, which is devoted to pictures of, you guessed it:

If I’m going to bookmark this blog, where should it go? I have a fun tag, that would be the obvious choice, but I have a zillion other things there, and it would get buried. Ditto photography, funny and blogs. I don’t have a cute tag because I’m not secure enough in my manhood. I could do biology or mammals, but those include too many non-cute, non-funny entries. There’s no point in having an otters tag, since it probably won’t get used more than once. Really, what I want is to be able to use any of those descriptors, plus whatever others I can think of. Then later I can stumble on this blog through any number of different paths.

Tagging can be a bit of a chore at the outset, at least until you have your personal system worked out. Other users’ tags are rarely perfect, but they’re a good jumping off point. For Cute Otters, the recommendations include video, photography, mammals, funny, fun and blogs. Folksonomy isn’t perfect. Delicious sees “otter” and “otters” as two different tags. It falls to you to decide what the rules are going to be. Nouns? Verbs? Slangy? Serious? It’s up to you, but if your system is going to work, you do need to make some definite choices and stick to them.

Other Delicious users are an incredibly valuable resource

Once you’ve saved a given bookmark, you can click back through and see which Delicious users bookmarked it too, and all the other items they’ve bookmarked. And now comes the truly social part of social bookmarking. Chances are that if a given Delicious user has bookmarked a few of the same web sites as you, they’re broadly interested in what you’re interested in. You can sign up to follow any user’s public posts.

Over the year and a half I’ve been using it, I’ve collected a network of a hundred or so people, nearly all of whom are total strangers to me. These people live in California and Japan and Finland and China and everywhere else in the internet-centric world. They’re out there as I type this, assiduously combing the internet for stuff that I probably find interesting and posting it here. I check in on my Delicious network’s posts five or seven or seventeen times a day. The signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically higher than on any of the blogs or news media I read.

Within my network is a core group, folks who frequently post the same stuff as me, whose stuff I often repost, and who repost a lot of my stuff. Now some of them are even sending me links directly. Here’s every bookmark I’ve discovered through a fellow Delicious user. Here are all of my bookmarks that have been saved by someone else. And if you’re already a Delicious user, here’s a fun graphical way to explore your extended network.

Delicious is a way to connect to a community of like-minded internet strangers

Modern life is lonely. Our monkeyspheres are scattered across appalling distances. Our face-to-face contact with even our close families is so limited as to shock my Polish in-laws. The sense of community that humans took for granted for most of evolutionary history is a scarce emotional commodity here in America. We have to find it where we can. Delicious isn’t a substitute for a closely-knit monkeysphere, but it has some adaptive benefits of its own. It puts me in much closer touch with the memes, and it gives me a chance to participate in a big conversation, to give and receive, to be led down unexpected paths, to drink from an informational firehose that would have made my bookish ancestors weak in the knees. Delicious has some of the same pleasure for me that the Park Slope Food Co-op has, the chance to connect with people, to participate in something bigger than myself, both for broad emotional reasons and for simple practicality.

Your Delicious activity reveals your own emergent thoughts

Once you have a whole bunch of tags, new patterns begin to emerge among them. Your Delicious tags reveal the topology of your own thoughts to you in endless novel permutations. Here’s a cloud of my most frequently-used tags. Click any one to see all the bookmarks that have that tag.

Delicious is a great jumping off point for writing

If I want to write something about anything, my first step is take a look at my pertinent Delicious tags. So if I’m going to work on, say, something about Alan Turing, my first step is to look at all my bookmarks tagged Turing. In addition to tagging, Delicious has a text field where you can put in relevent notes and quotes. A lot of the time, I can fit all of the important information in a bookmark page into the annotation field. By default, if you highlight a block of text before you bookmark a page, it automatically gets added to the notes field. I’m assiduous about my note taking, so I usually don’t need to visit my bookmarked sites. I just copy and paste the whole page into a text file and then prune, prune, prune.

Flickr is the second most useful site on the social web. It shares many of Delicious’ best qualities, like tagging and the rich inspiration of other users. Here are my Flickr items tagged with Delicious. After looking at my Turing tag on Delicious, my next move would be to take a look at my Turing tag on Flickr.

This post has taken on a life of its own on Delicious

For maximum recursive enjoyment, here are all the Delicious users who have bookmarked this very post. Update: more than thirty people have bookmarked it so far. Reading their summaries is a whole new layer of meta-insight for me, showing what people take away from my writing, often not the passages I’m expecting. The “new module of my brain” line was a jokey toss-off, but several Delicious users quoted it: britta, cmakvaca, rgreco, ABoothroyd, leeinaustin and arosner. So now I’m reconsidering its importance.