Social bookmarking: keeping me organized one tag at a time
I love Delicious. As indicated in my post earlier this week announcing Idealware's Social Media Resource Library, for the past couple of months, I have been conducting an audit on available social media resources for nonprofits. There is a ton of information out there, and many people with great experiences and expertise, so I needed a way to keep everything (myself) organized.
Delicious was an obvious answer, even though I had never used the tool before. It was fairly intuitive to tag resources based on their topic. Since I knew we might be publicizing our bookmarks afterward, I took the time to write up what I thought would be a good tagging scheme. But, the more I dived in, learned more, and began to prioritize different things, my tagging scheme shifted throughout the whole process (for example, to start I had twitter also tagged with microblog, but in the end I decided to put it in with socialnetworking). It still made sense to me, but probably not to very many other people. So, I actually went back and re-tagged everything to make it easier for people (you, hopefully) to search for items of interest.
Lesson learned? Define your tagging scheme up front and stick to it!
Through the research, I found that a lot of people had used Delicious to keep organized. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li even used it to keep resources and case studies organized by chapter while they were writing Groundswell (according the book). Many sites and people encourage others to tag resources with their name, to help build libraries of resources around a certain subject. We Are Media, (curated by Beth Kanter on behalf of NTEN) asks their community to take 5 minutes to tag interesting resources with wearemedia in Delicious.
One thing I haven’t been able to figure out yet, is if it is possible to track how many people go to Idealware’s Library on Delicious and which tags they are searching for the most. That would be really helpful, and could help us make sure that we had sufficient resources according to people’s needs.
Has your organization used Delicious to keep resources organized? Did you make the bookmarks publically available? Tell us about your experience in the comments.
Delicious was an obvious answer, even though I had never used the tool before. It was fairly intuitive to tag resources based on their topic. Since I knew we might be publicizing our bookmarks afterward, I took the time to write up what I thought would be a good tagging scheme. But, the more I dived in, learned more, and began to prioritize different things, my tagging scheme shifted throughout the whole process (for example, to start I had twitter also tagged with microblog, but in the end I decided to put it in with socialnetworking). It still made sense to me, but probably not to very many other people. So, I actually went back and re-tagged everything to make it easier for people (you, hopefully) to search for items of interest.
Lesson learned? Define your tagging scheme up front and stick to it!
Through the research, I found that a lot of people had used Delicious to keep organized. Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li even used it to keep resources and case studies organized by chapter while they were writing Groundswell (according the book). Many sites and people encourage others to tag resources with their name, to help build libraries of resources around a certain subject. We Are Media, (curated by Beth Kanter on behalf of NTEN) asks their community to take 5 minutes to tag interesting resources with wearemedia in Delicious.
One thing I haven’t been able to figure out yet, is if it is possible to track how many people go to Idealware’s Library on Delicious and which tags they are searching for the most. That would be really helpful, and could help us make sure that we had sufficient resources according to people’s needs.
Has your organization used Delicious to keep resources organized? Did you make the bookmarks publically available? Tell us about your experience in the comments.
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6 Comments:
Thanks for sharing this. I love using Delicious to keep track of my personal bookmarks and really wish more people used the service. I am assisting with a project to do similar resource gathering that you are doing, but more geared towards community technology centers (CTCs) and not really social media. One issue is how to sift through the clutter. When you have a tagging scheme I think there is a desire to catch as many bookmarks as possible. This means excellent resources might get lost among more frivolous ones. I wonder if the solution is just having a tag for those superstar bookmarks?
I agree there should be a better way for Idealware and other people who want to share organized bookmarks to keep track of how people are accessing them (and maybe even contribute and edit them). Hopefully Delicious will take note someday....
-Scott R(from Digital Arts Service Corps!)
Hi Scott,
When I first started tagging, I tried to rank by relevance, but that didn't work very well (especially since I didn't know enough about what existed at the beginning). I tagged everything I read. When I went back through and re-tagged, that is when it became clearer to me that if you use multiple tags, it is easier to find much more specific resources when you need them. I also tagged a few as "mustread," though that mostly just my opinion as to what was most helpful.
Since Delicious has neither its own analytics feature nor does it offer the ability add your own scripts or tracking codes, you're out of luck when it comes to determining page views and popular bookmarks on the site (unless you create a trackable short URL for everything you bookmark! I wonder if anyone actually does that...).
However, I think there's more value in exporting bookmarks as RSS feeds than actually directing people to your profile. At Cross-Cultural Solutions, we use our Delicious profile, volunteerabroad, to keep track of our news and social media mentions, as well as blogs written by our volunteers while abroad.
We use tag feeds to bring bookmarked content to our websites. For news and social media mentions that we bookmark, we use its RSS feed on our website's CCS in the News page so it's always up-to-date with the latest bookmarks. We also display a Delicious widget of relevant tags on our community site, too, and a "career" feed that we pull into our LinkedIn group for CCS alumni.
Lots more ideas in the pipeline, too!
I'm with Matt. I've always thought of Delicious as a web site that's best purposes are the ones that don't entail actual visits. Fueling your website's link page; shared resource gathering that's published to your intranet or extranet; or information aggregation ala nptech.info. It's more of an information tool than a destination. Have you thought about setting up a simple Drupal site to publish the social media bookmark collection on? That would provide a more user-friendly presentation and an analyzable website to track.
Matt and Peter - Thank you for sharing, and great idea re: publishing the Delicious bookmarks on a more user-friendly site. I will look into it!
I'm still hoping for Google Bookmarks to add Delicious-like features like sharing (some of) your booksmarks. Unfortunately that hasn't happened yet but I'm counting on it!
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