I ran into Todd Sieling at Take5 Cafe today (our defacto Innovation Commons - sign up to put your money down now!). He's been working with a company down in the valley on something very timely -- a social bookmarking site called ma.gnolia. Todd actually briefed Roland and myself on this a couple of months back, and we were bitterly disappointed when we didn't get a live demo. Today, Todd clicked me through a couple of sample pages. What can I say? The design looks nice and polished, we quibbled a bit about what the semantics of "send a link" are and what icons should like, and so on. I'm looking forward to kicking the tires on it when it goes live some time in the new year, especially since its target is regular web users. Saying things like "get a del.icio.us account and subscribe to your private 'for:' feed in RSS" pretty much results in blank stares today...

So, can another (or any?) social bookmarking site succeed? Well, aside from arguing as Paul Kedrosky does that del.icio.us' installed base are "early-adopter geeks utterly unrepresentative of anything approximately a larger market than del.icio.us's current 300,000 supposed users". Of course, there are all sorts of interesting comments in that post going back and forth about whether buying del.icio.us was "worth it" for Yahoo, and I've actually changed my mind a couple of times because of the different viewpoints there.

Seems like lots of people are talking about link logs or link lists posted to their blogs, and whether or not people find them useful.

Darren explains his thoughts on daily links, and asks for feedback on whether his readers like them (he himself admits the link round ups were "probably [not] that compelling to me in the first place". Feedback for Darren: only do it if it is useful to you. I might very well subscribe to a feed of your links if you offered them, as they are fairly easy to skim in a newsreader. But, they don't really draw people back to your site, so only do it if *you* want to. Or, do both: integrate them directly into your site (or sync them), but make it a separate feed/archive that people can pay attention to or not as they choose.

I've manually posted a few link round ups over time, but never used del.icio.us (read all about del.icio.us here) or other link gathering tool to automatically post here. Why? They really are a different content type from blog posts. Some people may be interested in them, but many likely won't be. Inserting link content into blog posts muddies blog posts. For those that really do want to follow my links, you can get my feed from del.icio.us directly. When I finalize on the event/calendaring tools that I use, you can "watch" what I'm doing through a separate events feed. Point is, these are separate types of content than text blog posts, and should (need?) to be handled separately.

My use of links is...well, I don't know why I'm doing it. I have the vague sense that I should bookmark or note down stuff that is interesting, not important/relevant/timely enough to devote a whole blog post to, and a way to share those links with others. Richard described the "for:username" usage of del.icio.us -- feel free to send me stuff by adding the tag "for:borismann" to links you tag at del.icio.us.

I'm link farming the future, thinking that at some future time I may search my links or go back to them or...do something with them.

I showed Kate how to setup and use del.icio.us the other day, then there was a question about it on the FastCompany - Vancouver Company of Friends mailing list, and I realized that most of the people I deal with just know what it is, so I've never really written about it.

So, here's something I sent along to the CoF list.

Del.icio.us is known as a "social bookmarking tool". For starters, you can sign up for an account and then store all your bookmarks there. Why would you want to do that? Well, here are a couple of reasons:
1) it's an easy, central place that you can get to from any computer
2) you can use simple tag-based categories to organize your bookmarks
3) you can socially/collaboratively use tags (by, e.g. all using "vancouvercof") to gather a list of shared resources