Stuffed on Delicious

Back in the day when Best Websites first emigrated to Delicious, I did a tiny taste test to try to get a flavour for what exactly a social bookmarking site was, and I've used it periodically to answer the fairly bland questions we seem to get at Memorial Park. This time arriving for my second helping, I sampled the "Learn More" and "Help" features to try to acquire a more detailed understanding of all the ingredients that are blended together in order to serve up such Delicious-ness. And of course in the meantime, I've been fed a diet of terms like "tags," "tag bundles" and "clouds," so it was much more like home cookin' this time around, instead of the foreign cuisine it appeared to be at first.

You'll never starve for options on Delicious. With a buffet of 646 tags linking you to 492 bookmarks, there are many ways to find just the dish you're looking for - we don't all have to follow the exact same recipe.  I can see how it is so much easier and faster to attach multiple tags to one bookmark, than to attach a link under multiple folders or subjects.

I can't even remember now if we had a search option in Best Websites or if we did, what it was like. Searching on Delicious is easy and I like that you can see your search path at the top, related tags on the right side, and you can also click on a tag you see listed under individual bookmarks.

However, the Delicious smorgasbord might be a recipe for disaster, if the one thing you're looking for is swimming obscurely in the goulash of tags. Six hundred and forty-six is a lot of tags to look through if it becomes apparent that your topic is not contained in one of the 37 tag bundles, and I assume that number could bloat infinitely larger, at some point becoming too unwieldy to be useful. Hopefully, there's a master chef out there somewhere making sure this doesn't happen!

Also, I keep getting distracted by all the numbers floating around and what they are meant to indicate. To me, these numbers are like empty calories - tidbits of information that fill me up, but aren't necessary for actually finding what I need. I have to continually remind myself that the numbers to the right of the tag bundles are not the number of bookmarked websites found under that heading, but the number of individual tags which make up the bundle. Then, when I click on one of the tag bundles and bring up a list of tags, I have to tell myself that the number to the right of the tag is now the number of bookmarks, which is what I was expecting in the previous step. And let's not forget about the numbers to the right of the bookmarks which indicate the number of people who have saved that bookmark, and the date the bookmark was added displayed to the left of the bookmark.

Delicious would absolutely be a useful recipe box for organizations or businesses that have a lot of information they need to organize and access. But I don't think I would use it regularly enough to justify creating an account of my own. 

I think I've spit out just about all the cheesy metaphors I can cough up in relation to Delicious, so...I'll stop now. Besides, all this talk has made me hungry. It's time for a snack!