Software over the rainbow

Some days ago, I added a list with my last bookmarks in delicious to the sidebar. As soon as it began to work, I realised something: as in most cases I didn’t change the bookmark’s title and I usually left the extended description empty (trusting heavily in tags as a retreival tool), most of the links said very little about its content.

The thing I love most of delicious is its cognitive economy, and I use delicious for myself. I thought that adding that extra information would be cumbersome, so I thought of removing the thing on the sidebar.

But instead I began editing titles and adding some extended descriptions. Now it takes me something like 10 to 30 seconds more to add a link, but instead of losing, I think I’ve taken advantage of it:

• better self-filtering when adding (when I’m thinking of a description i can decide if I’ll really need it or will be of interest later).
• improved retrieving (either me and the delicious search engine have more information when having a look or searching through my bookmarks)
• overall consciousness of what I’m adding (It had become such an automatic thing that rarely I remembered what I had after a couple of days). This last consequence is the best, as it keeps in my head a nice limbo of things to review

So as it happens with blogs, if you do things for yourself, but publicly, you do them better.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 10.30 pm and is filed under Web, Thoughts, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.