What del.icio.us needs to do.

I went back to del.icio.us recently to give it another try. I used it briefly before to help prepare an article on Intranet 2.0 with Kathleen Gilroy. It was useful for this short term purpose. However, I saw that the long lists would quickly get out of control. So I looked at H2O Playlist with its ability to have multiple playlists and to group these playlsts of tags into subsections. However, the process of adding new items is much more tiem consuming that the few clicks with del.icio.us. So I went back to it.

There is a bundling feature that I was not aware of before. "Bundles are a way to arrange previously-used tags into groups. For example, if you have the tags "design", "painting", and "moma", you may want to group these together into a bundle called "art"."

This is good but I have 66 items under enterprise2.0 and I am sure there will be many more. I do not need to bundle this tag with another one. I need to break it down into subcategories. For example, I used the tag enterprise2.0 to group all my blog posts on the topic as I do not have enterprise2.0 as a category on my blog and it would be time consuming to add it backwards (here is a needed feature for Typepad). Now I have many other items on the topic that are not from my blog of course. So I wanted to group the items from my blog under a subcategory and that was what I had hoped bundles was for only to be disappointed. I have the same needs for tagged items from other specific sources that I tag more than once.

If del.icio.us allows you to break down growing lists of items under a tag into subcategories that will be a big improvement. Until then the list expansion factor will limit its ease of use. If anyone knows how to break down a list of items under a tag into subsections, I would greatly appreciate if they share it with us. I could easily have missed it.

On the plus side, it took me less than an hour to go back through my daily blogs posts for over a year to find the enterprise 2.0 ones and tag them to del.ico.us. Of course this ease of use is one reason for rapid list growth. I will continue to try it and I added a del.icio.us link on my blog on the left side. I laos started a web2.0marketing tag which I am sure will get very long soon.

Putting my blog posts into del.icio.us also allows me to see who else tagged these posts to determine the ones that others found useful enough to tag in del.icio.us. It was nice to see that most were tagged by at least one person. The top tagged ones in rank order were:

Making Wikis Work at Novell

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise – IBM’s Internal Tagging Tool - Dogear

IBM’s Social Software Initiatives: Blogs, Wikis, Tagging, and More – Part Three- Internal Applications

Enterprise 2.0 Predictions for 2007 enterprise tagging

Comments

[John Martin]

Hi Bill,

Just trying to wrap my head around what you mean by sub-categorizing. For example's sake, I have a del.icio.us feed for a grad course I am teaching. The URL is http://del.icio.us/rkclmr/ce5560. But what I think I hear you saying is that this process is fine until you want to expand or focus the content beneath that tag. So if my course uses the tag CE5560, but I wanted to sub-categorize the tag into headings such as readings, resources, misc I would need to create a separate but related tag, say CE5560-readings. Are you thinking something like http://del.icio.us/rkclmr/ce5560/readings or am I misunderstanding your point?

I have been wondering about this same thing for a bit. I've moved to Diigo for its commenting feature but it suffers from the same categorizing/tagging drawback.

John Martin
http://edventures.whitemountaintech.net

[bill Ives]

John This is exactly what I mean. If I understand you correctly, you can create an tag that is an extension of the first one. However, would you then have to manually retag all the stuff you want in the sub tag? Also this new tag would not appear nested within the orginal but would be a new tag. Check out http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2006/09/yesterday_i_wro.html and look at some of my reading lists. This tool was first created for course lists like yours. However, it takes more time to add stuff tham del.icio.us.

[John Martin]

It would seem to me similar to what blogs are beginning to do with parent-child category relationships. The WordPress Codex has a quick overview here ( http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates ). Something like that would seem to be a natural fit for any social bookmarking tool.

I like the clean layout of the H2O playlist but I see what you mean by it being a bit cumbersome. Of course I'm prefer to think that I'm efficient rather than lazy, in that I like a browser applet that allows me to right click on a link or page and send it direct to my tool of choice without a lot of extra effort. The Diigo ( http://www.diigo.com ) applet allows me to not only bookmark an item but to add clarifying information before I post it.

A blending of these functionalities would certainly add a new dimension to the social bookmarking experience.

Thanks for your insights!

John Martin
http://edventures.whitemountaintech.net

[bill Ives]

John Thanks again. I will certainly check out the links you provided. I love the picture on your site, having climbed all the 4000 footers in the White Mts. with my daughters, some in the winter. You work in a great area. We often stopped in Plymouth on our back to the Boston area. Bill

[Stephen]

Actually, all you have to do is tag items with more then one tag. Simply tag the item with your major category and the "sub categories" as seperate tags. So...an item would be tagged with enterprise2.0 and blogging for example. Then when you go to your del.icio.us account and click on the enterprise2.0 tag you will see a list of the related tags on the right side of the page. It will show all the other tags that have items also tagged enterprise2.0 only, so you can still use the blogging tag for other links. This can easily be used to subcategorize items without any additional functionality. If this does not make sense please shoot me an email. I think we are neighbors actually, so I could always explain over a coffee sometime. Best Regards.

[bill Ives]

Stephen. Thanks. This make sense. I assume you can go back and add tags to create subsections when the original section gets too big to manage. This would be a key feature as you are not likely to know how you might subcategorize at the start. Coffee also sounds good. I will send an emial.