Now more organized with del.icio.us

More from my library learning 2.0 blog:

There are so many ways the internet can suck you into a vortex of obsession, providing things to read that will keep you alive until one hundred and fifty just so you can get through it all. Each time you find something new, they add another layer of usefulness but they do that in addition to the useful things you already get somewhere else, witness the email/homepage wars between gmail and yahoo.

So, when I first came across del.icio.us a couple years ago, adding tags seemed to me just another way to add minutes and hours to the way in which web tools just suck up time. I didn't see the merit in spending even more time typing by adding tags.

BUT a librarian convinced me that it could be incredibly useful for organizing bookmarks, and for seeing what other people are looking at that tag things the same way you do. The first bit could be a time saver, but the second bit a time-consumer. So I have a gazillion blog posts saved in my bloglines account, thinking I'd like to read that book, or I'd like to write about this. But saving a post in bloglines is clunky, spiralling deeper into a memory hole that shows up as a grey number next to the blog's name. I've begun saving some of those in my new delicious account, especially the more than 50 from bookshelves of doom.

2nd post:

This is so handy now that I have a laptop and a desktop. I doubt I will use my browser for saving links anymore. You can upload your favorites from your computer to delicious. When you do so, delicious automatically sets those bookmarks to private.

Here's your cheat sheet:

1. If you haven't already, enable your ability to make links private. Click on settings, then private saving. I'm not sure if you have to do this to keep them private, but better to be safe than sorry.

2. Under settings again, click on import/upload, under bookmarks.

3. Create a file according to the instructions, very easy. Then import, according to instructions. Voila. This might be useful for branches that have a bunch of links at their ref desks....