Social Bookmarking Experiments

I love the whole idea of social bookmarking. I think del.icio.us is very cool for developers and folks have done scads of amazing things with it. I thought I would give it a try. I was so excited that I could import all of my bookmarks, but had trouble because of the spaces I had in some of my folders. Hey! My Macintosh doesn't mind spaces. Why should my bookmark manager?

Luckily for me, I know Computer Science students and my friend Andy wrote a little script (or performed some other kind of magic) that did this for me. Once it was done, I didn't care for the interface and I didn't like how it sorted and so I decided to stay with Backflip. I've apologized to Andy for this decision, by the way....and keep sending him links to new cool things I know he will like as penance.

I like that I can use my familiar folders and sub-folders in Backflip. And I use them often. I use these things to keep my bookmarks synchronized between my laptop and my desktop. Any time I have access to the Internet, I can use my bookmarks. I can use them to share links with students or to support presentations. I can collect links as I prepare for new projects. I can (and do!) keep them private sometimes - to maintain the confidentiality of a project or when something's not quite ready to be made public.

Tonight, I was reading the Library Stuff blog and saw that Alicia was working on a capstone project and wanted some information about how teachers use del.icio.us. I headed over to her posting to leave a comment. While I was there I looked around a bit more. Yesterday, she posted something titled "more funkiness" and she talked about this curious poster and the odd tags he used. She even included samples. I thought - those topics ALL interest me. I'm going to see who this curious poster is! Oh, my gosh! It's me. She's talking about me!!

So, dear Alicia. It's not a dude, but a dudette making those links. I don't know how Andy got that import to work, but the underscores were part of the solution. I'm glad you like my links. Just so you know, I have a similar failed experiment over at Furl, too. I keep thinking I'll get that organized eventually, but neither of these places let you import and keep your folder structure. I haven't had time to get the Furl account organized to even consider making a change. For now my active bookmarking is happening at Backflip. You should check out those links! I hope I've answered all your questions. If not, you know how to get in touch with me.