Social bookmarking

It’s a phenomenon of web 2.0/user-generated content and all those other keywords tags going around these days. Spreadshirt just implemented a del.icio.us icon so that visitors could add products to their lists. And there’s debating going on about whether Spreadshirt users want more of the same.

There’s a survey going on at Spreadshirt now asking just that question: is social bookmarking valuable to you?
It’s up for debate. There’s enthusiasm (but, honestly a lot of it seems industry-generated), like Contactivity, who write:

At first glance this may not sound terribly revolutionary, and you may not even like the idea of having everyone see your bookmarks, but this very simple technology is potentially as transformative in the way that we all use the web as Google was…the more bookmarks we save, the more unwieldy our collection becomes. Very often we need to save one particular webpage, not an entire site and for this, bookmarks are inefficient.

This enables you to save and ‘file’ any individual webpage without having to clutter up your bookmarks with hundreds or thousands of links. Think of social bookmarking as an online filing cabinet, and the keywords, or ‘tags’, you apply to each saved URL as the folders within your bookmarks, but much more dynamic.

But there are the more critical, an old blog posting (old as in October 2005) from 99 little bugs… that says:

I’m a long time del.icio.us and digg user. Since a while my online bookmarks collection has a few hundreds entries classified in many tags. Nothing to complain about the system, it’s great, but I find myself accessing my bookmarks again very rare, even if I want a thing from the bookmarks, I’d rather hit Ctrl+K in Firefox and google it, 99% of the cases, the answer will popup in the first result if you remember the right keyword(s) and…surprise in allmost all the cases I remember the keywords.

So, why not trusting your brain’s memory to remember stuff ? I mean, it’s one of its main functions and we are trying more and more to forget it. I’m not asking anybody to start remembering complicated URLS, but using del.icio.us or any other social bookmarking service for remembering stuff it’s pretty useless in my case.

And there are the more balanced, like WeBreakStuff, saying:

You could say tagging is really cool. And it is. But there is one aspect to tagging that some people usually don’t think about: the lack of motivation to tag for public consumption. Allow me to explain: when you tag something in del.icio.us, you’re doing it for yourself and not others. In fact, the number of cases on which you would tag for others is extremely limited, because *who cares* about how you tag if they won’t use that information?