How to Become a del.icio.us Black Belt

After RSS, I have to believe social bookmarking is the next “gateway drug” one would partake in on their journey to total Web 2.0-ination. And of, course, bookmarking powerhouse del.icio.us leads the pack of these types of sites (though, Ma.gnolia.com still holds a special place in my heart) bringing simplicity of design and a minimalist interface (complemented nicely by AJAX – but only where it’s useful). It’s easy to use and, coupled with the super-badass Firefox add-on, it’s easy as pie to save your place on the web.

But the flexibility del.icio.us offers gives you plenty of room to collect an unwieldy mass of bookmarks with no organization whatsoever. “But good sir!”, you might say, “the reason they use tags is to make ‘historical’ organization less relevant! The tags hold the necessary information!”. While that may be true, that doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be a method to your tagging madness. Arbitrarily tagging links with all the tags you can think of may be popular method, but before you know it you’ll find yourself hip-deep in meaningless tags that have very little relationship between them.

The whole point of bookmarking a site is so you can find it later. That should be the first thing you think of when choosing the tags for a link. I have developed a simple tagging methodology based lightly on the scientific/biological classification of organisms. But first, some general bookmarking and tagging tips…

• Be Consistent – Personally, I suck at this. I’m forever going to the del.icio.us help area and replacing “blog” with “blogs”, “hack” with “hacks” and so on. Pick a general tag format and stick with it. (Teaser: I’m actually working on a programmatic solution for fixing tags in batches which should be coming soon). Taking the time to avoid mistakes like these will save you time in the long run by not forcing you to search/sift more than you have to.
• Bookmark Everything – With a system like del.icio.us, it really makes no difference how many things you bookmark (provided you have an intelligent tagging method – keep reading). I recently passed the 1000 mark in my bookmark collection, and there are a great many people with several times that amount. Anything that looks remotely interesting, bookmark it – because you never know when you might need it. For instance, I’ve probably written about 50 lines of Javascript in my entire programming career – but as I write this, I have 26 links tagged with “javascript”. Why? Because I plan on learning it one day and I like knowing that I’ve got a good amount of stuff saved to get me started. And while you may never use much of what you bookmark, it’s a good habit to get into because you never know.
• Tag Liberally – The more tags you have on a link, the more possible ways you can access it. Think of all the different contexts/situations in which you might want to find that link, use those to determine how you’re likely to remember it (and more importantly, access it later). Once you’ve nailed down your basic “treetrunk tags” (as I’m fond of calling them – more on that later), add as many other relevant keywords as you can think of. After all, you’re trying to describe everything this link has to offer, right?
• Don’t Use Ambiguous Tags – Tags like ‘interesting’ or ‘fun’ are a waste and serve no purpose whatsoever. If the bookmark didn’t interest you, you wouldn’t save it. And bookmarks aren’t fun – those little mini candy bars you get on Halloween, now those are fun. Once you get a respectable link library going, your tag cloud/list is going to be freakin’ huge – there’s no reason to clutter it up with any fluff.

Now that we’ve covered some of my basic tips for tagging, let’s get on with the meat, shall we?

When tagging a link, it’s important to do so with forethought. While you can certainly tag to your heart’s content, it’s important to start with (or, at least, include) what I call “treetrunk tags” – the bare-bones tags to add to a link to make it reasonably easy to retrieve later. I’ve broken these down into a sort of categorization system that goes a little something like this:

• Category – What type of site/content are you bookmarking? Is it a blog? A news article? An mp3 file? “blogs”,”articles” and “mp3s” would work perfectly here. This tag gives the most basic idea as to what type of content we’re saving.
• General Subject – What’s the page about, generally? Child abuse? Micro-Economics? Programming in a new language? “crime”, “economics”, “programming” would fit nicely here as they are more specific about the type of content, but general enough to allow for easy “sub-categorization”
• Specific Subject – Now that you’ve tagged it in a general sense, it’s time to get more specific. Let’s say we’re tagging a blog post about how to make your own shoe polish or something. So far, you’d have something like “blogs” and “shoes” as your tags. Now, you might add something like “polish” or “shine”, something that delves a little deeper into the content of the page. Starting to notice a pattern here?
• Link Type – Is the link a news story? a rant? a tutorial? a video? Tag accordingly – this will be another way to effectively narrow your search when you revisit these links. For our shoe polish example, I’d put a “howto”, “tutorial”, “instructional” here (which, as far as I’m concerned, are synonyms – and using more than one would just add to clutter).
• Action – What (if anything) do you want to do with this link? Perhaps you’d like to read it when you get home (“read” + “@home”), or maybe print it at the office (“print” + “@work”). This is obviously optional, but it’ll go a long way toward keeping what you want to take action on in only a few possible places.
• Tag-nado – This is the part where you get to go buck-wild crazy and click all of the suggested tags, add more of your own or whatever you want. This might be a good place for descriptive tags like “funny” or the like. Again, totally optional but might help you on a Friday afternoon when you’re waiting for 5pm to roll around (hint: a search “video”+”funny” will produce hours of entertainment). I’d probably call our shoe-polish-making blog post “informative”, “projects”, “domestic” and whatever else I could think of at that moment.
• Sharing – This is social bookmarking, right? So why not fire this link off to a few friends? Just tag it as “for:username” and it’ll show up in their “Links for You” section lickity-split.

Now that you’ve got the basics skeleton in place, you will have a much easier time finding your links next time, simply by narrowing your search. And you don’t even have to start at the top! Want that shoe polish link? Try “shoes” + “howto”… and you’re 95% of the way there, I promise

There you have it, a crash-course in del.icio.us mastery. Comments, criticisms and general feedback welcome!

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Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, web2.0, tagging, folksonomy, productivity, social bookmarking