Social Bookmarking – Getting More Organized?

This week’s topic – social bookmarking – has been an exercise in frustration for me. That said, I found Will Richardson’s chapter on social bookmarking interesting and helpful. I also read and watched all the trail fires and even found some new ones. I really liked the video by Lee Lefever Social Bookmarking in Plain English. However, I am probably one of the only people out there who is so systematic and structured in my use of browser based bookmarks, that I actually find social bookmarking sites like delicious and Diigo to be disorganized! At last count, I had 1679 bookmarks on my Firefox browser ranging from professional (French grammar sites) to personal (yoga getaways). Up until this month, I thought that my system of bookmark organization was pretty good. I never had problems finding things as I used a fairly detailed system of bookmarking web pages. It was not until I uploaded my bookmarks into delicious that I had a bit of a meltdown. My orderly world of file folders and websites disappeared into hundreds of unorganized bookmarked sites. Then I checked out the other Firefox add-ons for social bookmarking, such as Bookmarker and Startaid. Not much luck there either.

Thinking that it was just the interface on delicious that I didn’t like, I tried Diigo and had some success. I was able to upload my bookmarks into that site after much trial and error. I first attempted to use the import function on the interface to no avail. I found I had to export my bookmarks to an HTML file and then upload that file to Diigo and had limited success. This was not very friendly to this user. The advertised interface did not measure up to the claims that it made. Once the bookmarks were uploaded to Diigo I once again found that my organized universe was disrupted. I found that moving within my bookmarks was cumbersome as each link had to be retrieved over the Internet. Even with a high-speed connection this was markedly slower than using the local bookmarks. Moreover, they were not laid out visually nearly as well as through my browser. I also had problems reconciling the number of bookmarks reported on Diigo as to what I actually have in my browser. As earlier stated, Firefox reported that I have 1,679 bookmarks and Diigo reports 1,088 after the import. This was after shutting down the all open browser windows and logging off. I could not determine if Diigo eliminated the duplicates (of which I don’t believe I have any) or excluded dead links. I doubt I have approximately 600 dead links.

Lessons Learned:
When experimenting with new technology, it is important to critically examine its potential and drawbacks. Just because everyone else is raving about it, doesn’t mean it is necessarily useful for the individual. The reviewed social bookmarking sites do not provide me with any significant benefits over using the local browser’s method of organizing except for the fact that I can access them from web browser. Granted, this is beneficial when I am sharing websites with my students for project work and research and for resource sharing with colleagues, but the search time required to find the site, and the related frustration, does not, in my humble opinion, warrant using the services. I have not tried every social bookmarking site out there but reviews have supported that the ones I did try are supposed to be the better ones available.

I am struggling with the random and chaotic nature of learning in Web 2.0. As Joanie mentions in her blog, that she feels like she is starting to learn in an entirely different and scattered way. I agree with her wholeheartedly. This is definitely a challenge for the concrete sequential, visual learner that I am. In theory, I like the idea of a folksonomy to tag bookmarks as opposed to a pre-determined or proscribed method of organization, but aren’t there inherent problems with this classification system? A tag I might use to identify a site might be completely different than my French Immersion colleague in Saskatchewan, thus depriving both of us the ability to share our resources. In any case, it is going to take some time for me to process all of this. However, I am not going to write off social bookmarking completely. I recognize that social bookmarking is in its infancy and that there will most likely be improvements as it evolves. That said, I will continue to explore the sites that I have signed up for and try to make the most of them.