The Financial Times, Saturday, September 24, 2005
As I write, there’s some buzz about a website cataloguing “idea generation techniques”... systems for getting creative. Like 390 other idea-hungry people today, I’ve been intrigued by, and bookmarked, the site. Now I’m curious to discover more about the subject. A single click later I have a whole array of obscure but specialised websites about idea generation, brainstorming, creative thinking, productivity. How did I do this? Google? No way. It wouldn’t have been creative or productive enough. I’ve used a “social bookmarking” website called del.icio.us (pr. delicious).
Del.icio.us and another website called Wists are at the forefront of what the clickerati are already calling Web2.0, a democratisation of the internet driven by a blogging technology that allows us all to not only read what’s online, but also edit, interact with and add to it.
As a concept, social bookmarking itself is so simple it can seem - until you properly ruminate on the possibilities - insignificant. Instead of storing your favourite web addresses, your “bookmarks”, on your own computer, you sign up with del.icio.us or Wists, and store them publicly, online. Other users can browse your bookmarks and make them their own. You can browse theirs, too. To help organise your bookmarks, you “tag” them with keywords (I might tag the FT website with “broadsheet”, “economics”, “newspaper”, “finance”). Very quickly, a complex network of personally recommended sites - minutely searchable by tag or by user - grows like a living organism. Wists - a relatively recent website - stored a million bookmarks after just three months. Wists founder, David Galbraith, an ex-Foster and Partners architect and one of the originators behind online news aggregation service Moreover, tells me the figure recently reached 1.7 million, “and it’s growing. And growing”.
So what’s so radical about social bookmarking? How is it more exciting than Google? Well, on a purely practical level, it’s a godsend to anybody who uses more than a single computer. Now, your bookmarks can be accessed anywhere. But more interesting is the kind of information it enables us to retrieve from the internet. The Google robot might seem ingenious, but it stumbles through the supermarkets and slums of the web without distinguishing them from the libraries and museums. Compared to real internet users, choosing and saving the most interesting websites, it’s very dumb. Social bookmarking separates the information from the trash, and turns searching into an art form.
For instance, I could go to the del.icio.us website, and see what other sites have been tagged with “economics” or “newspaper”. I could widen my research in a number of different directions, by seeing what other tags have been commonly used along with “economics” or “newspaper”, and browse the sites related to those new tags, too. Or I could even find which other users have bookmarked sites tagged “newspaper” or “economics”, and browse their bookmarks (because it’s likely we’ve interests in common). Suddenly we’re a community, sharing enthusiasms and recommendations... all of us wandering from one closely related keyword to another, on a magic carpet of hand-selected bookmarks: the best of the web. It’s a little like having the freedom to browse a stranger’s CD collection, and borrow what takes your fancy. But it’s a lot like the democratic, Utopian vision of the internet, before it allowed itself to become prematurely bloated and addicted to retail and porn. (What’s more, if you’ve some internet time to spare, there’s something satisfying about watching “the front page” - seeing the links as they come in and get categorised. Tracking the buzz.)
Already there are social bookmarking alternatives to del.icio.us and Wists, and - in a move that suggests the concept has the hallmarks of a permanent internet innovation - Yahoo has recently launched its own test-version called My Web 2.0 (currently holding 130,000 bookmarks, 43,500 tags).
Del.icio.us is ideal for research and text-heavy websites. Wists - from “wish lists” - differs primarily by storing a little image from each website bookmarked, ideal for bookmarking shopping and design-related subjects. David Galbraith says he designed it this way to satisfy his architecturally-trained, more visual imagination:
“The process of picking products was a very visual process - cutting things out of magazines, putting them in scrapbooks. It seemed that on the web bookmarking could be more visual. So, for instance, if you were looking for a house, you could collect pictures of all the houses and then go through them later.”
Social bookmarking is not without its teething problems. Both del.icio.us and Wists are theoretically susceptible to spammers, who could use a combination of deliberately misleading tags and false bookmarks to promote their own sites. And with democracy comes a little chaos. The tagging system is entirely unordered, so somebody’s chips may be somebody else’s french fries; turkey could be a country or a big bird. Galbraith and Joshua Schachter (who launched del.icio.us) have Darwinian inevitability on their side, suggesting that taggers, left to their own devices, will eventually find better conventions than anything imposed from the top down.
To get the ball rolling, I’ve set up an FT Weekend account at Wists, where FT Weekend readers can log and share their favourite websites. Go to www.wists.com; click help for how to drag the “add to Wists” button into your browser bar, and then you’re good to go. Log in with email address ftweekend@gmail.com and the password saturday. As far as I know, this will be the first experiment of its kind, so make use of the facility, tag carefully, and check back for each other’s favourite websites. And then go and play with del.icio.us, too. Linton Chiswick
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