Hmmm...that's del.icio.us!

Last year I was impressed with Delicious.  I thought it was a great place to pool all our collected websites and more importantly sort them by topics via tags so they become searchable. Very nice.

But what about now?

The Twitter connection is a great idea, particularly within a workplace.  It would be easy in inform staff of a new site if they were all connected to the libraries Twitter site.  I notice that though the link says its delicious it actually takes you to the bookmarks site.  Very clean and very simple.

For customers, I'm not so sure I how this would be much different from just adding the link to your Twitter site.


I can't say I use any feature beyond bookmarking in Delicious.  As everything is tagged when added I find it simple to search and have no problem finding my old links.  As mentioned above the new Twitter option is cute and for me give more value to Twitter in the workplace.


As for recommendations, I always like clicking on the numbers to the right of each link showing how many times that site as been bookmarked.  It's interested to see what other people tag sites, it can help give inspiration to reference equiries when the site you have is sort of what you want, but not quite there.

Twittering about Twitter

I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...I must remember #nswlearning2.1...

I've tried...I really have.  I've had the account for a few months and besides the creative mind puzzle of trying to fit what I want to say elloquently  into 140 characters I haven't had use for it personally.

And I suspect that lots of people feel the same.

Having looked at a few tweets I'm seeing a general pattern of simple tweeted and added value tweets.  Let me explain

  Simple tweets are just a statement just thrown out into space to be accepted by the cosmos as it sees fit, for example:

stephenfry: A warm and sunny day. Highly cheering.

Ground breaking stuff.  In the library world this would be equilivant example:

BCLIS:  Summer Reading Club starts Monday 16 November. 

Useful and dull.  It doesn't tell you what Summer Reading Club is or contain a link to where to find the branches participating.

On the whole, most organisational tweets I read are more your value added than those above.  The tweet you have when the 140 character just aren't enough:

TheBritishLibrary:  Points of View on C4 News tonight http://bit.ly/pointsofview Free - come and see it

This tweet includes a link to another site which provides more information.  Which means that this group have found the can not communicate as they would have liked  in Twitter so they need to put what they want to say somewhere else and link to Twitter.  Twitter ceases to be communication itself, but a link from your readers to your communication.

It's just not enough

And that's the problem for me with Twitter, it's just not enough.  I can only express myself in a tiny space (all of which I can do on my macro-blog site if I so wish) and requires me to be fluent in game-speak to make any real sense of others' communications. I can't just write a simple tag into a Labels box to help find my post, I have to add # marks after my statement and make it look...messy.

I'd love to think that people will follow their library Twitter and find the tweets interesting and useful.  I'd love to think I can catch people in the nick of time to let them know about an event that's starting, or closing or that I think could be really popular.  Prove me wrong.

And just as I'm about to publish this post I read this tweet:

wilw:   One of my neighbors is having a pine tree cut down. The whole street smells like Christmas.

Maybe it's not so bad.