Thing 13 - Del.icio.us

As the 12 minute video was pulled from the Net before I got to this point, I watched another suggested one (the tinyurl one). Del.icio.us reminds me of a cross between Google relevance indexing and citation abstract indexing, Web style, with a dash of communal control over the shaping of the data set. In plain English, things relevant to a person can be found, added, sculpted for a specific or new purpose, then shared back to the community at large, where further evolution can occur. Spiffy! And it's easy to use and lets you take your bookmarks anywhere you can log onto the Net.

I ran some searches on things mundane and obscure, and I notice that for the obscure items, often very small communities exist, which narrows the usefulness of del.icio.us searching. For example, I searched for sites about a very recent software upgrade to a new piece of Adobe software for image editing (Lightroom v.1.2), which has been out for almost a month. There were very few sites, less than 20, addressing the software, and they were largely from Adobe. This meant that the site that had the greatest number of comments (over 200) was helpful, but many of the other sites had fewer than 10 comments, making it hard to get a sense of the community using the sites. By expanding the search to the previous version (1.1), several hundred sites were found with lots of comments that were useful. I think the potential in del.icio.us lies in its networking and social structure, especially in things less esoteric than my test pursuits.