It’s time for deep cleaning. My delicious.com site is out of control. It’s bloated, overloaded and almost as overstuffed as my neglected guestroom closet. 
The problem with delicious (and its cousin, diigo.com, which I also use) is that they are ridiculously effortless; you can save a website as a bookmark online with a single click from the toolbar, label it with a handy category tag, and leave the room as if nothing ever happened. This means it’s dangerously easy to collect more websites than I can handle.
I’m planning to go on a strict makeover regime, a delicious binge and purge: this will be a systematic, focused program to rediscover treasures, organize my collection of sites, and throw out the trash. You can join me if you think your bookmarks are getting out of control. You might recognize yourself in this list of symptoms:
Warning signs that it’s time for a delicious purge:
- I have more than 100 bookmarks. More than 500. More than 1000. More than 2000 …
- Sometimes while surfing the web, I’ve clicked on a site to bookmark it, only to discover that I already saved it eons ago but didn’t recognize it.
- I often bookmark sites and never return to them.
- Sometimes I don’t read or examine a website closely; I just skim it enough to say, “Hey, this looks like a good one!” and tag it. I call this “lazy-eye surfing.”
- I have two — sometimes more — versions of the same tag, written differently (such as ed_tech and educational_technology).
- In a Wordle cloud, my delicious tag collection contains font sizes ranging from 120 pt. to -20 pt., which means there are two extremes in my tags: those containing one single website as well as those containing literally hundreds of websites. I finally grew some intelligence and asked myself, “Just how useful is this? One tag with hundreds of websites? Inversely, how logical is a tag that only contains one solitary bookmarked site?” (These are rhetorical questions. I know the answers.)
I’m going on a “Serendipity Hunt”
This summer I’m going to spend some time cleaning up my delicious sites. I call it my “delicious binge and purge” because although I’ll be getting rid of many sites and tags (purging), I’ll also rediscover hidden treasure (binging). Delightful serendipity: I predict that I’ll find a wealth of old memories and treasures that I overlooked or forgot, and I will share them with my PLN (Professional/Personal Learning Network).
Feel free to join me!
Logistics:
- Set a timer to limit time on task. There’s no need to invite fatigue or boredom! I’m planning on 30-minute or hour-long sessions. I know I won’t get everything done at one time. Heck, I might not even get much done this summer, or this year! I’m going to tackle this project one step at a time in a manageable and comfortable pace.
- No rules apply: be methodical or jump around; I’m going with whatever feels comfortable. I might want to take each site down the list or I might want to simply cruise for what interests me most.
- Attack in small bites, each session with a different focus. Today’s focus, for example, is on shaking the sites up for a different view of them. The next sessions (in later posts) will deal with renaming tags, bundling tags, etc.
- Diigo.com will need attention, too… later. I plan on tackling diigo in the same way another time. First, as a warm-up, my focus will be on delicious.
- Eat chocolate or chew gum or do something pleasurable while in a delicious session. Why? Just because.
OK, Here we go:
Step #1: Shake it up!
Click on image:
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Posted on July 7th, 2009 by Sharon Elin
Filed under: Uncategorized
Me too! I have a little over 4700 bookmarks and recently wrote a post about tagging as I was making an effort to clean things up. http://bookminder.blogspot.com/2009/07/playing-tag.html
Great screen cast, by the way, what program did you use?
I use my bookmarks as an online library and it’s the first place I search when looking for something for myself or others. I haven’t decided yet how deep a cleaning I’ll do. Is there a limit to the number of bookmarks one can have? That might encourage me to trim things a bit, if I knew I was nearing a limit. LOL.
Anyway, I enjoyed your post. Good luck with the spring cleaning!
Thanks for the comment, Lesley, and I’m glad to see that I’m not the only overloader in delicious. I like your analogy of an “online library.” That makes it sound a bit more positive to have nearly 5,000 bookmarked sites, doesn’t it? I’m going to start referring to my bookmarks as an online library now.
No, I don’t think there are any limits. I think organization is the key for easy and seamless access when looking for websites later. When I publish my next posts, about tagging, that’s when I hope to really clean things up. Thank you so much for leading me to your blog, which has some excellent ideas for naming conventions and establishing other personal rules about the tagging process. This was something I planned to touch on, as well. I hope you don’t mind if I link to your blog in those future posts.
Thanks, also, for asking about the video. I used Camtasia to create the screencast, and saved it as an .swf video.
I am going to diigo this post and then…read it next summer…Jeez…I need to organize my book marks too…great ideas here…thanks…I spend most of my time on twitter…but I like plurk too…where it seems you spend most of your time…This looks like a great blog:)
Jeff