Bookmarks – Discovering Social Networks
February 7th, 2006 | by Digvijay Lamba |Managing bookmarks has been a constant headache for me. I visit far too many sites and my bookmarks list is usually huge. In fact the effort needed to bookmark this websites is extraordinary to say the least. That was until I discovered Social Networks. Tagging for organization instead of using folders is an old idea. I first saw it in the M2 mail client that Opera comes with. However, it is only recently (and I know I was late) that I discovered it’s potential for bookmark management.
For the uninitiated, the concept is simple. You create an account on a website where all your bookmarks are maintained tagged with words you have given. By consolidating the bookmarks of several users and allowing cross access, it builds a searchable database of links that is very accurate. And as the searched words have been manually taged to results the accuracy sometimes beats regular search engines. Allowing you to find the right site easily.
After I heard of this, I tried some popular sites, including Yahoo… but the missing feature, and one that I consider the killer feature, was to auto tag my bookmarks. Now, given today’s technology, it was simple of me to think of a tool that would cluster my bookmarks, or those of several users and decide which ones are similar in nature thus giving them similar tags. However, no one seemed to do it.
Enter del.icio.us and its companion site Cluster your del.icio.us bookmarks. You can take your del.icio bookmarks and the site clusters them into convenient tag clouds that you can manually edit. Later, you can export these from del.icio into a convenient directory structure for your browsers too.. not that you need to do that. And to top it by downloading this Extension you can integrate the del.icio functionality to Firefox allowing tagging using the context menu.
So, join del.icio, import your bookmarks and cluster tag them. Then, have an organized bookmarks experience.
Enjoy 
-Digvijay
Tags: Great Sites, Reviews, Software
