Diigo v. Delicious

Tinkering with Social Bookmarking


I should start off saying, this sub-title is misleading.  I've only read about the social aspect of these sites described by Richardson (89-99), with tagging, and RSS feeds of user tags, etc.  I have been tinkering with adding and organizing links. 



I mentioned in my previous post that after finding resources for using Google Earth in class, I needed a way organize them, and I didn't want to make a hyperlink list in a Google Doc.  After reading Alex's post, discussing the potential and concerns for linking on blogs, I decided I need to give Delicious a try.  I was immediately impressed with its method of organizing links into "stacks," a dynamic and visual variation of the desktop folder. In the stack, all of my organized links are displayed like an RSS feed, with a clickable screen-shot of the page I linked to. Before I had time to really enjoy this feature, which I think was added only months ago, I discovered that the stacks were coming down, at the requests of users (see: Delicious Blog).


This feature was great.  Why would they take it away?  Actually, this was the whole reason why I wanted to use Delicious.  I didn't want to have to scroll through pages and pages of links to find related resources.


Diigo still has the option to add links to a list, and I discovered that it's really simply to transfer my link collection (saved together in an .HTML file), between Diigo and Delicious. 


But, why were my needs so appearantly different from other Delicious users (regular enough to send comments and complaints to the developers)?  Clearly, I've missed the point of tagging, the "folk-sonomy" method of organizing information.  Regular users don't need stacks and lists.  They've developed methods of tagging, and can find what they need through their tags, and subscriptions to other users' tags.


Richardson comments on my dilemma: "Obviously, if we are to be expected to participate in the construction of "folk-sonomies" to save the information that we find, it will require us to redefine the processes we currently use in relative isolation" (91).  I tried to put a filing cabinet in the Internet.