Jon Udell: del.icio.us: the screencast “a whirlwind tour of del.icio.us from my [Jon's] own perspective as a power user”.
See the screencast here.

If you haven’t watched any of Jon Udell’s Screencasts, you should go hunt some down. I linked to another one here, and some quick searches should find you others.

In today’s episode, Jon gives us a quick tour of his del.icio.us tag cosmos. It’s a really interesting 5 minutes - enough to make you want to try del.icio.us if you haven’t and almost enough to make you want to go back if you’ve given up on it.

Almost.

I think what it comes down to is that when I tried the del.icio.us service initially I wasn’t really looking for a social bookmarking service. I was looking for a single place to keep links that wasn’t my browser and was taggable and reachable from any machine anywhere. Since then I’ve collected a few links about folksonomies and mass taxonomy but haven’t had time to read any of them.

And that’s what it really came down to with del.icio.us: time. It would have taken far too much of it for me to keep my tag cosmos organized and together - a skill which Jon ‘casts for his viewers in such a way that I can now understand how one might be able to keep things deliciously straight, whereas before watching Jon do his magic I couldn’t even conceive of a method of staying on top of it all. That doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way I could possibly spend the amount of time necessary to do so. In that vein it is interesting to note that Jon and I have widely disparate ratios of delicious posts::delicious tags; he has 1.03 posts per tag as of this writing and I have 0.62 posts per tag. I suspect that’s a testament to the level of mental organization and discipline each of us has, as evidenced by Jon’s delicious skills.

I’d be very interested in participating in some kind of social bookmarking network, to add my unique interconnections to all the other unique interconnections out there and to make meaning from chaos, whcih is what it seems that these services are working towards, at some level. But the looseness of totally free-text meta-data means that any meaning I personally could add would be next to worthless. What I’d like to see is a tool that combines Google Suggest with del.icio.us and gives me some hints about potential tags that others are using to categorize their posts. Even if it only gave me hints at what I’ve previously used that would be a boon. Until then I’ll have to settle for the less social but much more useful (to me) furl.