Tagging with Gmail and del.icio.us

del.icio.us/marmaladegirl

In an effort to get to grips with del.icio.us I've signed up and put loads of my bookmarked sites on.

In the past I have struggled with this site, firstly I was put off by it's bland design and then by a lack of explination about what the site actually did. But everyone keeps hammering on about how great it is, so I decided to put a bit of effort in to see what all the chatter is about.

Very quickly I began to see the advantages of having a centralised resource for my bookmarks. I mean the websites I like on my laptop don't change when I'm on the PC. Then there is the infamous tagging,which has become a cornerstone in what are considered Web 2.0 applications, the advantages of which are less obvious at first.

I had a similar issue when I first used Gmail, I couldn't really see the advantages of tagging my mail, as most emails had only one label. But to get the most out of labels or tagging it required me to think in a different way about how my data was stored. I'd become so used to a tree like directory structure that when faced with labels I just replicated a folder structure by adding a single label to each email.

My experience with del.icio.us was very different because creating and adding tags is far more straightfoward. As a result of this more tags are created and once I'd created more descriptive tags for differnet URLs I'd go back and add them to earlier entries too. This lead to having a far richer dictionary of tags to choose from supported by additional suggested tags.

I'm still getting familiar with del.icio.us but tagging has allowed me to crossreference my URLs pulling out not only my own bookmarks but finding similar links from other members. The visual presentation of my tags also allows me to see where the focus of my online interests lie; like a bizzarro biography.