Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

Oh, Delicious. I was so excited when I discovered it a few years ago, and it’s been kind of a heartbreak since then. I started out using it for its intended purpose, as a convenient way to store my browser bookmarks online. I still use it for that, though now it’s become more of a public-facing place for research and note-taking. My bookmarks all go to my Facebook profile automatically, in case someone there might find them useful. The particularly interesting ones I also manually post to Twitter.

The heartache comes from the way Yahoo has been managing Delicious since they bought it, or more accurately, not managing it. After a halfhearted redesign, Yahoo has mostly just been ignoring it, especially its rudimentary and poorly designed social features. This is a shame, since I have yet to find a better source of news and items of interest than other users’ bookmarks. I’ve assembled a list of about a hundred people in my network, and their collective posts have a dazzlingly high signal to noise ratio. When I want to see what’s going on in the world or on the net, my Delicious network feed is the first thing I look at, before any news site or blog reader.

Flickr

I don’t take a lot of snapshots, so I’m not putting many actual photos on Flickr. I mostly use it to store graphics like the one at the top of this post. For a while I was also using Flickr as an image blog, a convenient repository for images I found on the web. Now I mostly use Tumblr for random image blogging. But I do love the way Flickr lets you tag and categorize things, it lets me gather and sort research materials in an intuitive way. Flickr is extremely well search engine optimized, and it supports a robust ecosystem of secondary aggregators and rebloggers. If you put something on Flickr and license it Creative Commons, you’re guaranteed to get a bunch of clicks on it.

Everything I post on Flickr goes to Facebook automatically. When I mark someone else’s image as a favorite, it goes to my Tumblr, and from there to Facebook, the logic being that these pictures are likely to be interesting to my friends. Since Yahoo owns Flickr, bookmarking the images on Delicious is elegant, with automatic thumbnail generation. Even so, I don’t find myself bookmarking images too often. If something is that fascinating, usually I’ll find a reason to work it into a blog post.

Tumblr

I mostly use Tumblr for stuff that’s too random or trivial to merit a full blog post. It’s an effortless one-click process to reblog someone else’s Tumblr post, so I do that a lot. I stream my Flickr favorites here because their randomness fits the Tumblr vibe well. Everything I put on Tumblr goes automatically to Facebook, because why not, and hopefully it’s not so many posts that it’s annoying to people.

Facebook

Yes, it’s evil. But all my friends are on there, and increasingly my relatives too. My policy is to only friend people I know in real life, though I’ve made a few exceptions for cool folks I’ve met on the internet. It’s convenient to have almost everyone I know in one place, but I don’t trust FB with anything too personal.

For a while I had my blog posts going to FB automatically via RSS. I had to stop, though, because the way FB handles blog feeds is so irritating. FB renders imported blog posts as static snapshots. This is no good for me, because I tend to publish my posts when they’re still a bit unfinished, and then copyedit them after they’ve gone live. It keeps me from being too fussy and precious. Also, I use my stats to guide the allocation of my finite editorial resources — posts that people are reading more, I edit more. Having static snapshots full of mistakes on FB does me no good. Also, any comments that people were making on the FB posts aren’t visible to readers here (and vice versa.) So now I manually add links to new blog posts.

Twitter

I’ve resisted the temptation to cross-post my tweets to Facebook because I find it irritating when other people do it. My FB and Twitter friend lists overlap a fair bit and I don’t like reading all those 140-character witticisms twice. Also, on FB I’m writing exclusively for people who know me personally, whereas on Twitter I’m mostly writing for strangers, so the voice and content are different. I do send recent tweets to my blog sidebar automatically, I don’t find that too spammy when other people do it.

This blog

Nearly all the substantial personal writing I’ve done for the past few years has taken place here. There’s something about the public-facing aspect of blogging that keeps my fires burning. I love the WordPress platform for the way it facilitates my creative thinking like few other computer tools I’ve used.

LinkedIn

I keep my online resume here on the blog, but I like LinkedIn a lot and foresee it playing a greater role in my professional life over time. It has its own status updates, but that’s one too many statuses for me to be updating, so I just stream my work Twitter feed in there.

Friendfeed

There was a while there when I was so infatuated with Friendfeed that I made it the centerpiece of my personal home page. What could be a better landing page than an automatic aggregate of everything else I post on the social web? Well, as it turns out, there are a lot of problems with posting an unfiltered lifestream. While a comprehensive listing of everything I post everywhere is useful and interesting to me, it’s not so useful or interesting to anyone else. Looking at other people’s lifestreams is mostly just exhausting.

There’s also the problem of duplicate content. Let’s say I bookmark something on Delicious and also post it to Twitter. Friendfeed displays both posts. There’s no way that I know of to recognize and eliminate duplicates automatically. For a while I tried deleting duplicates manually, but that was too annoying. I still keep my Friendfeed active, though, both for communitarian and cynical reasons. The communitarian reason is that there are some people out there who like the lifestreaming format. It’s not a lot of people, but they do exist. The cynical reason is search engine optimization. A link on an automatic Friendfeed post counts to Google’s spiders, even if no human ever clicks it.

So, there you have it. I’m about to embark on a new social media consulting job, and that’ll probably extend my web footprint. Like, I just joined Foursquare and Yelp, not because I have much need for them personally, but because they’re significant for clients and I need to know how they work.

This landscape shifts fast, so maybe I’ll come back to this post down the road and chuckle at how obsolete it is. I still have a MySpace profile that I can’t figure out how to delete. Who knows which of the profiles above are going to look similarly comical in a few years?

There are two different ways to make yourself a WordPress blog. There’s the more advanced method, which offers you full functionality, and the easy method, which is a little limited but is, like I said, easy.

The advanced method

You can download the software and set it up yourself, which is how my blog works. To do so, you need a web host, a place for your blog to live. People have generally good things to say about Bluehost. My business uses Apollo Hosting. I also know a lot of people and organizations that use GoDaddy, but I’m put off by their sleazy branding.

Once you have your hosting set up, getting WordPress installed requires a small amount of fairly scary technical business, best handled by a web geek like me. WordPress brags about having a five minute installation, and it’s true, but it can be a hairy five minutes if you’re a web novice. Some hosting companies make it easier by offering an automated installation system.

The easy way

If you want a gentler introduction, you can sign up for a free blog on wordpress.com. If you set up your blog there, all the behind-the-scenes admin is handled magically by the elves of WordPress’ parent company Automattic. Having a blog hosted on wordpress.com requires no web savvy and minimal fuss. The only downside is that blogs hosted by WordPress don’t give you access to the full range of plugins and other tools. A good option for novices is to start out with a WordPress.com hosted blog, and then as they develop more confidence, move into a full-blown self-hosted blog. Fortunately, it’s easy to export posts from one WP blog and import them into another one.

Reasons to love WordPress

Geeks like to make a distinction between free as in speech and free as in beer. WordPress is free as in speech and free as in beer. The basic code is open-source. You’re welcome to explore its innards, hacking to the fullest extent of your courage. If, like me, you know some HTML and CSS, you have complete control over how your blog looks. If you know PHP, Ajax and JavaScript, you can create your own plugins and custom add-ons. You’re free to give away or sell any of your additions to the WordPress ecosystem.

You might wonder why Automattic is so generous as to give away blog software and server space to host it. What’s in it for them? According to their web site, they make money from optional paid upgrades to wordpress.com blogs, consulting services, anti-spam technology, and affiliate deals.

WP’s open-sourceness can be a mixed blessing. The user interface doesn’t have the glossy polish of a Google or Apple product. But for me, the rough edges are a small price to pay. Google’s and Apple’s own blog products are excellent inadvertent advertisements for WordPress. They work fine as far as they go, but they’re severely limited in their feature sets and aren’t easily extensible. For example, in WordPress you can easily insert “Click here to read more” links into longer posts. Google’s Blogger system only lets you perform this useful function through an awkward and lengthy workaround.

The WordPress community is fiddling with the code day and night, adding new features and hunting down bugs. Users of Blogger are at the mercy of Google’s priorities, and right now it doesn’t seem like Blogger is very high on their list. Also, Google has been known to take down blogs for hosting copyrighted material like mp3s. I’ve never heard of Automattic taking a blog down for any reason.

WordPress in the wild

• Gawker Media.
• The New York Times blogs.
• Jay-Z’s official web site. He’s not a businessman, he’s a business, man.
• Smashing Magazine, a great web design resource.
• WordPress.com is itself a humungous multi-user WordPress blog. Recursive!

WordPress does have some time costs. The user experience can be a challenge. You sometimes get exposed to frightening strings of PHP. But the community has got your back. The ever-growing list of free plugins handles all kinds of advanced functionality that used to require heavy-duty coding. For instance, a simple plugin makes your blog renders attractively on iPhones and other mobile devices. Here’s how mine looks on the phone:

The less attractive side of the open-source coin is the official WordPress iPhone/iPad app. In theory, it’s pretty rad. You can write posts from the phone, edit and upload them, with a lot of the same functionality you get on the full web version. Unfortunately, the app is buggy and unreliable. It’s failed to save my work and has even eaten a few posts. I hope it receives some more developer attention. Being able to write posts while I wait for the train or stand in line at the grocery store is a miraculous thing. It makes me feel like I’m living in the future — when it works. I guess this aspect of the future hasn’t fully arrived yet.

Like all open-source entities, WordPress evolves quickly. It gets hacked easily and often, but it bounces back robustly. Last year a malicious virus broke every single link in my blog, incoming and internal. But a patch was released immediately and I had my site back to normal in a matter of minutes. It was a scary couple of minutes, but no harm befell me.

WordPress isn’t the best tool for every situation. If you’re a bigger company or organization, you might want a more robust content management system like Joomla or Drupal. A former employer of mine and my old high school both use Moodle, though no one at either of those institutions has much love for it. There are some commercial products that perform WordPress-like functions with a much more polished user experience. A nonprofit I’ve done some volunteer work for uses Squarespace, which is reasonably inexpensive and quite approachable.

Handy WordPress tips

The Lost In Translation blog has a handy setup guide for a new WP installation, including initial configuration tips and a list of recommended plugins. It makes a great preflight checklist.

Even if you plan to extensively hand-code a customized look for your WP site, starting with the right theme can save you a lot of effort. I use a modified version of the veryplaintxt theme, which replicates the look and feel of McSweeney’s. I like the serif fonts and lots of white space, but I made all the centered text left-aligned, since I don’t like hourglass-shaped text columns.

I have a bunch of nice WordPress themes bookmarked on Delicious. Happy designing!

Historically, search engine results were ranked based on the frequency and proximity of keywords in the page text. But as the web grows, there are tons and tons of pages out there with the same or similar keywords. Any Google search on any remotely mainstream topic is going to return thousands and thousands of hits, most of which are useless to you. Another problem is that the keyword system is easy to game. Unscrupulous web designers can load up a page with invisible keywords repeated over and over, by putting them in the same color as the background off to the side of the page.

To make its results more useful, Google tries to rank its keyword-based search results in the order of their relevance. They do this using a complex proprietary algorithm called PageRank, the real heart of their search engine. One of PageRank’s most heavily weighted factors is the number of links pointing to a page. If more people link to your site, presumably that’s because it’s more useful or authoritative. PageRank also recursively factors in the number of links going into those pages that link to you.

So the key to a higher Google rank is getting other pages to link to you. The question is, how do you get those precious inbound links?

The first step is to do a lot of linking to yourself. Using blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr and other social networks, you can link to your own site with impunity. A single Twitter post is a full-fledged web page unto itself and any links within it count just as much toward your Google PageRank as any other.

Internal links from one page within your web site to another all count towards your PageRank total. This is why blogs are so great for SEO. They create tons of internal links automatically: tags, categories, previous/next post links, and so on. WordPress users can get even more SEO benefit from plugins like Random Posts, Calendar and Most Commented.

Another way to get your URL out there is to comment on other people’s blogs. Nearly all blog platforms give you a chance to add a link to yourself when you post a comment. This SEO strategy has given rise to the automated blog-commenting spambot, a program that generates a human-seeming comment from keywords in your site with a link back to some online vitamin seller or what have you.

In addition to links, you still need to make sure your keywords are in place in your page copy. What search terms are people likely to use when looking for your site? Put yourself in the shoes of a stranger out there on the internet. Do some Google searches in character as this stranger. Make sure the phrases that you’re searching with appear verbatim in your page text.

Freshness of content matters too. Google ranks newer material higher than older material. This is yet another reason why blogs are better than static web sites for getting yourself noticed. Twitter is even better for keeping your presence up-to-date.

Plain-English URLs and page titles help too. Notice that the addresses of the posts in this blog spell out what the post is about. If your page titles and URLs give some indication of what’s on the page, that helps both humans and the Google robots identify them properly.

SEO companies have all sorts of esoteric methods and tricks, technical stuff like alt tags and XML sitemaps. By all means, try these things, they can’t hurt and might marginally help. But fundamentally, SEO is all about having well-written content that’s genuinely useful or interesting to other people, and having lots of links pointing at your site. These more basic approaches take time and effort, but ultimately, they really work.

Blogging scratches the same itch in me as SimCity or Civilization, except instead of building a virtual terrarium I’m building social connections.

This is not to knock SimCity and Civilization at all. They’re a ton of fun, and they’re brilliant teaching tools for computer science and the concept of emergence. Blogging is a better real-time strategy game, though, because it brings me non-hypothetical real-world benefits.

The stats on my blog are a writerly gold mine. Anybody who clicks on one of my posts is voting for the ideas in that post. I tend to put stuff up when it’s about two thirds of the way done. Posts that get a lot of hits and comments get more attention and revision from me. My readers decide collectively what gets more attention, what gets polished up into presentable prose and what gets left as free form public note-taking. The really hot ones, about the Funky Drummer or Delicious or Auto-tune The News, are smooth and polished like the rocks in a particularly lively river.

No surprise: the internet loves Michael Jackson and Lil Wayne. Surprises: the internet loves math. Especially dividing by zero. The internet also loves quantum mechanics and its broad overlaps with musical harmonics.

Even better than the stats are the commenters. Moderating my comments is one of the most fun aspects of blogging. I get to be the editor of my own private little Atlantic Monthly. Asking for comments has been a good way for me to crowdsource research, mobilizing my smart friends and any internet stranger who happens along to gather unexpected new data.

I don’t approve all of my comments. Any blog attracts a lot of automated spam comments, some of which slip past the filter. Fortunately, spam is easily spotted. As for hate mail, I don’t get very much. Usually people who disagree with me just stop reading and move on. Long, thoughtful disagreement is even more rare. When someone does disagree with me at length, I take it as a token of respect and am happy to post and respond. This guy’s comment was an opportunity for me to practice my grownup debating skills, learning to disagree agreeably. This is a growth area for me, and the blog has been good for practicing.

Blogging from the iPhone has turned out to be an unexpected treat. I would have expected the phone to be a severely limited blogging tool compared to the full screen and keyboard. For editing HTML, the phone is not the right tool for the job, but it’s perfectly fine for writing prose. Editing and moderating from the WordPress iPhone app is still cumbersome, but the fact that it even exists and they give it away free is a near miracle. I wrote most of this post while waiting in lines. Who needs a Game Boy?

“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”

The article gives Gawker writer Nick Douglas’ reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.

What I like about Gawker prose is that it uses the voices of specific, recognizable humans that inhabit the same reality I do. Gawker and its siblings are like the Stewart and Colbert of blogs.

Blog media gets very recursive. It’s easy to get sucked in to blogging about blogging. Gawker does its share of that, but they’re good humored about it. I especially enjoy their list of blog media cliches, for which they graciously shoulder their share of the blame:

“Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. [purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo. [undesirable conclusion]. Oy. [amazed paraphrase of opposing position]. Seriously? Seriously? What’s next? [outlandish scenario]? I’m looking at you, [example of complaint]. Um, [condescension]? [Undesirable experience] made my [sensory organ] bleed. [x] is the new [y].”

Here are some high points from my Gawker tag on Delicious:

How Rudy Giuliani Soothes Conservative Fears:

“The cross-dressing thing probably doesn’t put your mind at ease. And the fact that I’ve been married three times, once to my cousin, well, even I find that a little creepy. But you know what? 9/11. Also: Firemen! Flags! Kittens with firemen!”

Meet The Rich:

“Searching for Donald Trump in the VIP tent at the Bridgehampton Polo club isn’t hard. The man stands out like he’s written in all caps. TRUMP, says his hair. TRUMP, proclaim his slitty eyes.”

On a great sadness of New York City:

“It’s been such a long wait for all of us! But at last, the World Trade Centre is nearly ready for its opening day. In just a few months, it will be a proud day for all of us in Bahrain.”

From mid-2008, Will Wright To Launch 2005′s Best Video Game This September:

“Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, stepped down from his platinum throne on Mount Olympus to tell Newsweek why it took so long: He had a hard time dumbing down his magical world for human minds.”

I’m Not Addicted To The Internet, I Just Need It Inside Me:

“Imagine having a conversation and being able to invisibly call up instant research. For all practical purposes, you’d be as smart as the Internet (or as dumb as the Internet, but still.) Twelve hours a day online is unhealthy; that’s why I need twenty-four.”

A beautiful caption: Photo of Britney Spears In Tiny Car Makes Us Wistful

On the death of LSD inventor Albert Hoffman:

“When you see him with his white hair and suit and tie, all looking like a Deutsche Bank senior VP, and you realize he couldn’t get his drug legalized, you just shake your head sadly for the stinky, beardy NORML kids on every college campus everywhere.”

We Are The Champions. Of Drugs:

“Shed a patriotic tear, fellow Americans: we are the most drugged-out nation in the world… Suck our woolie blunt smoke, Kiwis!… All it takes is one look at this handy chart to see… did you lock the front door? Did you hear something?”

Sarah Palin, The Life-iest Pro-Life Candidate Who Ever Scared The Crap Out Of Me:

“So by now you know John McCain picked some pretty lady from Alaska as his running mate. Crafty! But you have never heard of her before. No one really has. Sure, she was profiled in Vogue a few months back, but you don’t get Vogue for the articles, and the reason for that is that the Vogue profile totally missed one of the most interesting things about Sarah Palin, which is that she found out her fifth baby had Down syndrome through prenatal testing and she went ahead and had him anyway. Do you know how many people do that? Ten percent of people do that… There are many many people, a silent plurality I would even venture, who believe abortion is technically a kind of murder, but that it should stay legal anyway.”

Your Guide To the Endless Newsweek Story on the Endless Campaign:

“In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska.”

We Are Old And Sad:

“On one hand, we’ll get to see The Roots on TV every night; on the other hand, Black Thought opening for Jimmy Fallon every night is the cultural equivalent of Miles Davis playing his horn on the subway platform to back up a semi-trained dancing spider monkey.”

Barack Obama’s Secret Identity Revealed: Boring Yuppie

“Barack Obama — he’s just like us, if you’re a constitutional law professor married to a lawyer.”

White House Memo: Please Damn Bush With Faint Praise

“The single nicest tribute to the man from roughly January through November of this year came from Oliver Stone. But, post-election, post-John McCain, mid-Sarah Palin, Republicans are grudgingly, mildly complimentary of the inept man-child president they used to love. The nice thing about the Republican media machine is that they generally repeat their talking points verbatim instead of, like, reworking them to sound original.”

My online presence aspires to the condition of Gawker.

Why is storing your bookmarks online such a good idea?

Having your bookmarks online makes them accessible from any computer. There’s also the added insurance against something bad happening to your computer, like spilling coffee into it twice in a month, like I did. That’s well and good, but it’s only the tip of the Delicious iceberg. I mean, there are plenty of ways to back up your bookmarks online. Why, I get asked a lot, do I want the whole world looking at my bookmarks? I get something very powerful in return, getting to look at everybody else’s bookmarks. More importantly, I can see how everyone else sorts and annotates their stuff.

Tagging is the best way to organize knowledge

If, like I have, you embark on a major internet research project or three, you quickly amass an enormous number of bookmarks. Keeping them all sorted is the only way to make them useful. The problem with conventional bookmarking is the problem with most computer ontologies. Everything has to go in a particular folder or subfolder, meaning it can’t go in any of the other folders. This unambiguous hierarchical tree is well-suited to the way the computer stores data, but it’s not well-suited to the way your brain works.

The human brain works by creating associations between ideas. Given a word, we can effortlessly free-associate from it, connecting memories, experiential knowledge, words that meaninglessly rhyme, and so on. We don’t do so well memorizing rigid binary sorting systems, even if we ourselves were the ones who set them up.

This isn’t just an intellectual limitation on our part. Designing rigid categories is a maddening process because there are always exceptions to any category, or items that belong in many categories, or items that seemingly belong to no category at all. It only gets worse when you have an elaborate recursive tree of folders within folders within folders to contend with. Information in the brain is made of associative networks with a high-dimensional, multiply-connected topology. It’s impossible to impose tree structures on our thoughts without losing a lot of valuable connections. What you really want is for a multiply-connected network-shaped filing system to spontaneously and flexibly emerge from its contents.

Delicious doesn’t sort your knowledge for you, but it comes closer than any other information-tracking system I’ve used, on the computer or off. To heck with the Dewey Decimal System. Instead of exclusive folders, Delicious has you describe each bookmark with a list of tags. For me, coming up with tags is a delightful little free-associative writing exercise in and of itself. If the page you’re bookmarking has been bookmarked by someone else, and it probably has, Delicious shows you the tags that person used used. If a whole bunch of people have bookmarked it, then it shows you the most commonly used tags. You can select the ones that suit your particular mental filing system and ignore the others.

So for instance, there’s a blog called Cute Otters, which is devoted to pictures of, you guessed it:

If I’m going to bookmark this blog, where should it go? I have a fun tag, that would be the obvious choice, but I have a zillion other things there, and it would get buried. Ditto photography, funny and blogs. I don’t have a cute tag because I’m not secure enough in my manhood. I could do biology or mammals, but those include too many non-cute, non-funny entries. There’s no point in having an otters tag, since it probably won’t get used more than once. Really, what I want is to be able to use any of those descriptors, plus whatever others I can think of. Then later I can stumble on this blog through any number of different paths.

Tagging can be a bit of a chore at the outset, at least until you have your personal system worked out. Other users’ tags are rarely perfect, but they’re a good jumping off point. For Cute Otters, the recommendations include video, photography, mammals, funny, fun and blogs. Folksonomy isn’t perfect. Delicious sees “otter” and “otters” as two different tags. It falls to you to decide what the rules are going to be. Nouns? Verbs? Slangy? Serious? It’s up to you, but if your system is going to work, you do need to make some definite choices and stick to them.

Other Delicious users are an incredibly valuable resource

Once you’ve saved a given bookmark, you can click back through and see which Delicious users bookmarked it too, and all the other items they’ve bookmarked. And now comes the truly social part of social bookmarking. Chances are that if a given Delicious user has bookmarked a few of the same web sites as you, they’re broadly interested in what you’re interested in. You can sign up to follow any user’s public posts.

Over the year and a half I’ve been using it, I’ve collected a network of a hundred or so people, nearly all of whom are total strangers to me. These people live in California and Japan and Finland and China and everywhere else in the internet-centric world. They’re out there as I type this, assiduously combing the internet for stuff that I probably find interesting and posting it here. I check in on my Delicious network’s posts five or seven or seventeen times a day. The signal-to-noise ratio is dramatically higher than on any of the blogs or news media I read.

Within my network is a core group, folks who frequently post the same stuff as me, whose stuff I often repost, and who repost a lot of my stuff. Now some of them are even sending me links directly. Here’s every bookmark I’ve discovered through a fellow Delicious user. Here are all of my bookmarks that have been saved by someone else. And if you’re already a Delicious user, here’s a fun graphical way to explore your extended network.

Delicious is a way to connect to a community of like-minded internet strangers

Modern life is lonely. Our monkeyspheres are scattered across appalling distances. Our face-to-face contact with even our close families is so limited as to shock my Polish in-laws. The sense of community that humans took for granted for most of evolutionary history is a scarce emotional commodity here in America. We have to find it where we can. Delicious isn’t a substitute for a closely-knit monkeysphere, but it has some adaptive benefits of its own. It puts me in much closer touch with the memes, and it gives me a chance to participate in a big conversation, to give and receive, to be led down unexpected paths, to drink from an informational firehose that would have made my bookish ancestors weak in the knees. Delicious has some of the same pleasure for me that the Park Slope Food Co-op has, the chance to connect with people, to participate in something bigger than myself, both for broad emotional reasons and for simple practicality.

Your Delicious activity reveals your own emergent thoughts

Once you have a whole bunch of tags, new patterns begin to emerge among them. Your Delicious tags reveal the topology of your own thoughts to you in endless novel permutations. Here’s a cloud of my most frequently-used tags. Click any one to see all the bookmarks that have that tag.

Delicious is a great jumping off point for writing

If I want to write something about anything, my first step is take a look at my pertinent Delicious tags. So if I’m going to work on, say, something about Alan Turing, my first step is to look at all my bookmarks tagged Turing. In addition to tagging, Delicious has a text field where you can put in relevent notes and quotes. A lot of the time, I can fit all of the important information in a bookmark page into the annotation field. By default, if you highlight a block of text before you bookmark a page, it automatically gets added to the notes field. I’m assiduous about my note taking, so I usually don’t need to visit my bookmarked sites. I just copy and paste the whole page into a text file and then prune, prune, prune.

Flickr is the second most useful site on the social web. It shares many of Delicious’ best qualities, like tagging and the rich inspiration of other users. Here are my Flickr items tagged with Delicious. After looking at my Turing tag on Delicious, my next move would be to take a look at my Turing tag on Flickr.

This post has taken on a life of its own on Delicious

For maximum recursive enjoyment, here are all the Delicious users who have bookmarked this very post. Update: more than thirty people have bookmarked it so far. Reading their summaries is a whole new layer of meta-insight for me, showing what people take away from my writing, often not the passages I’m expecting. The “new module of my brain” line was a jokey toss-off, but several Delicious users quoted it: britta, cmakvaca, rgreco, ABoothroyd, leeinaustin and arosner. So now I’m reconsidering its importance.