Pinboard – A Delicious Alternative?

As I have said on this blog before, I am a big fan of Delicious.  I personally find it a much more useful way of managing my favourites than just about any other tool I have tried.  When I read an article on TechCrunch suggesting that Delicious should be ditched in favour of  a new service called Pinboard, I was intrigued to know how much better it could be.  Consequently, me being an eager beaver, I signed up as a beta tester to get a sneaky peek.  Sadly, I was not chosen as one of the 100 beta testers, but I received an invitation nonetheless.  As yet, I have not had a major play with it, but I thought I would provide a little insight into what it has to offer.

Before I go any further, however, I must point out something about Pinboard that may well put you off at the start.  At present, the people behind are charging $2.84 to sign-up for the service.  Yes, there is a one-off charge to use the service.  Not the best start admittedly. And it is made slightly worse by a posting on their blog:

The site is now open to all comers, provided they pay a small signup fee that will grow in proportion to the total number of users. My hope is that this will keep the rate of growth manageable so the site stays fast and usable for everyone.

Around about now I am expecting most people to give up reading the remainder of this post, but I shall plough on regardless for those that are still interested (I say those…..).

If you have decided that you don’t mind paying a fee for the service and sign-up anyway, you will be pleased to know that you can import your bookmarks from Delicious via a very simple procedure.  Once that simple task is completed, you are presented with your bookmarks in a somewhat minimalist fashion (certainly compared to Delicious):

Pinboard Homepage

As you can see, it is very much a stripped down bookmarking tool (a Delicious Unplugged if you will).  On the left-hand side of the screen you have your list of bookmarks, complete with titles, descriptions, tags and dates.  On the right-hand side you have what seems to be a complete list of all your tags (I haven’t checked fully, but I noticed some tags that I know I have only applied once¹) which, as you would expect, link directly to a list of all the items with that tag.  I have some reservations about this which I will come onto later.

In terms of the tools that Pinboard puts in your hands to bookmark items, there are basically four different javascript links you can drag to your browser toolbar:

• The popup bookmarklet opens a little form window when you want to bookmark a page. It’s the fastest way to add a bookmark.
• The same page bookmarklet will load the save bookmark form in the same window as the page, with no popup.  It redirects back to the page afterwards.
• The my pinboard bookmarklet will take you to your bookmarks.
• read later will throw a URL on your “to read” list without badgering you for tags or descriptions.

When you click on the pop-up bookmarklet tab, you are presented with the following pop-up:

Pinboard pop-up window

The same-page bookmarklet is much the same only, obviously, it replaces the page you were viewing before returning after it has been bookmarked:

Pinboard - same page

I quite like the idea of the read later bookmarklet.  Instead of having to use a tag on Delicious, you can simply click on the bookmarklet and a small window will briefly appear to indicate that it has been successfully added (although it doesn’t actually tell you this).  Any items marked in this way are stored in a separate area so they cannot get confused with your other bookmarks – a handy little feature in my opinion.

Adding tags is also nice and simple. Much like Delicious, Pinboard predicts what tags you are going to add so that you can ensure that there is consistency in your tagging (without this consistency I would question the value of anyone using a tagging tool to manage bookmarks).

There is, however, one problem that I have noticed so far (aside the cost).  Unlike Delicious you cannot drill down your bookmarks by using tag combinations (at least as far as I can tell at the moment).  Personally I think this is a major oversight (although granted it still being tested).  I find it very useful to find things on Delicious using tag combinations.  For example, it is much easier to find the appropriate item when using a combination of the tags ‘digitaldivide’ and ‘ebooks’ than to search through the individual bookmarks for either tag.  Hunting around for that article on ebooks and the digital divide would be too time consuming on Pinboard as it presently stands.  Hopefully this will be addressed (I have actually posted to their Google Group regarding this very issue – let’s see if it is addressed).  [I have since had a response, see update below.]

As it stands at the moment, I’d stick with Delicious but Pinboard is certainly worth trying out if you prefer your bookmarking to be minimalist (and if you are happy to pay a fee).  In the meantime, I will certainly try my best to keep you up-to-date with Pinboard as a service and, should I ditch Delicious in its favour, I will be sure to let you know!

Links

Pinboard homepage
Google Group
Pinboard on Twitter
Pinboard blog (and RSS feed)

¹ Obviously I don’t have enough tags – I’ve just discovered that Pinboard only displays your top 200 tags, not all of them.

Update

I have now had a response from Pinboard’s Google Group.  It reads:

This is not implemented yet, but it’s a feature a lot of people are asking for.    I am thinking of folding tag algebra in to search – you could have queries like “t:beans -t:rice +t:tomato” and have the search results filtered appropriately.

I’ll update the site blog as I get closer to rolling this out.

I’ll report further once this feature has been rolled out.

Web 2.0 Technologies and Public Libraries

For a long time now, I have been a champion of public libraries using various web 2.0 tools in order to improve the quality of the service as well as to expand their reach.  Many web 2.0 technologies have the advantage of being utilised by a large number of people who would otherwise not engage in their local library service.  This is especially true for the group of people that reside somewhere between late childhood and pre-parenthood (although there are a great many parents who do not see the advantage of their local library).  However, utilising such technologies is fraught with problems.  Not least the issue of popularity.

Over the course of the past couple of years, a number of social networking sites have risen and fallen, supplanted by better, more attractive alternatives.  Take MySpace for example.  Although I personally have never had an account (I always found it a a bit of a mess), it was once the darling of the social networking world.  So much so, that Rupert Murdoch (previously unimpressed by the internet) was moved to buy it up in an attempt to gain influence in the expanding market.  Since those heady days, it has been supplanted by Facebook and Twitter as the networking medium of choice.  Now it barely gets a look-in from people who were once part of their core user base.

The fickle nature of social networking sites sprang to mind after reading a piece in TechCrunch on the social bookmarking tool Delicious.  According to Michael Arrington, Delicious is languishing as a result of poor development and declining traffic.  I have to say, as a regular user of Delicious, I was rather surprised by this.  I have been recommending it as a bookmarking tool for sometime now.  I find it simple to use, infinitely superior to storing links on your browser and easier to use than  many other similar services.  Not only do I now discover that, according to one writer anyway, Delicious is in terminal decline, but it is also being supplanted by a new and upcoming rival: Pinboard.  I have no idea how good this service is at the moment (it is in invitation beta mode at the moment – I have submitted my email address for beta testing), but it could provide an interesting alternative.

Perturbed as I am by the [predicted] demise of one of my favourite tools, it also begs the question: When should public libraries hop onboard the web 2.0 bus?  Imagine spending months of your time training staff on using Delicious as an information tool, only to suddenly find it has dropped off the radar and has become defunct.  Imagine spending months creating a Facebook page for your library, only to find that Facebook is no longer the cool thing with the very people you were trying to reach.  At what point should we take the plunge (if at all)? Should we just bite the bullet and get connecting?  Or should we sit and wait until we see how things pan out?  I am not sure if I know the answer.  In times of financial constraints, it seems hard to justify spending money on updating a variety of different web 2.0 technologies when any number of them could become defunct at any moment.  But on the other hand, what about the immediate benefits.  Like I said, it’s a tough call.  I would be interested to hear what others have to say on this.

Diigo and Delicious

After seeing a lot of stuff about Diigo floating around in the ether, I thought I should sign up and give it a try (as I do with these web 2.0 tools!).  So far I have been reasonably happy with it, although it does seem to lack some functionality that I rather like on Delicious (I have still kept my Delicious account running whilst I play with Diigo).  For example, Diigo doesn’t suggest tags like Delicious does (at least as far as I can fathom).  When I tag a page on Delicious, not only does it offer recommended tags (both from other users applied tags and my own), it will also predict what tag I am adding as I type it.  This makes my life much easier as it keeps my tags neatly organised.  With Delicious I can start typing in a tag and see instantly if this is a tag I would normally use (Delicious informs you how many times that tag has been used).  Without this functionality, I find myself staring blankly at the screen trying to work out what tags I would normally apply to an item.

Despite this minor flaw, Diigo definitely has one advantage over Delicious: the ability to highlight text on a web page.  Many a time I have bookmarked a site due to a small passage on the page.  The beauty of Diigo is that you can highlight the relevant passage for future relevance instead of having to scour the entire page at a later date, desperately trying to remember why you bookmarked the page in the first place.  This is certainly a massive advantage over Delicious and one that has made Diigo a resource worthy of further investigation.

For now, I will reserve my judgement until I have had more time to play around with it.  It certainly seems a useful tool, but to me it lacks Delicious’ simplicity (which may be a strength for many).  Maybe in time I will ditch Delicious in favour of Diigo.  At the moment I’m not so sure.

User-based tagging – creating chaos or a new order?

User-based tagging is not exactly a recent phenomenon.  Over the past few years it seems that practically every Web 2.0 innovation allows users to apply tags to items to add retrieval.  This has (somewhat predictably) caused a few in the library profession to throw their arms up in despair and claim that this ‘chaos’ will be the end of organised information retrieval as we know it.  This egalitarian system of organising information was always likely to upset the more elitist members of the library fraternity.  After all, what do they know about the subject matter of a particular source of information?  No, it is best left to the ‘professionals’.  But to what extent is this an accurate reflection of the use of tags by the general public?

There are a certain amount of limitations regarding the use of tags to index an item.  For example, there is a certain amount of inconsistency regarding the application of tags.  Take a typical set of tags on Delicious for example.  An article on the Library of Congress may be tagged in several ways:

• LOC
• Library_of_Congress
• libraryofcongress

Whilst all these tags may be appropriate for the individual, the lack of consistency does cause problems for other users.  A user searching for items on any one of these terms will miss any items tagged with any of the other terms.  Clearly with the possibility of such a high degree of ‘misses’, it cannot be described as a foolproof system by any means.

There are also problems when it comes to homonyms.  Take, for example, the word ‘bow’.  This can be used to refer to the implement used to fire arrows, as well as a decoration on a present.  Sticking with Delicious, should the user tap in ‘bow’ as a search term, they would be presented with list of links related to either medieval weaponry or decoration – two very different subjects with very different audiences! However, using Delicious, it should be possible to select an additional tag that will narrow the search down, although this is still likely to miss out relevant materials.

Although there are some issues with consistency, when tagging habits are analysed the picture isn’t nearly as chaotic as one would expect.  I have recently spent some time looking at such habits, and was interested to discover that there is a high level of  commonality between users tags.  Take an article by Peter Merholz entitled ‘Metadata for the masses’.  At time of analysing tagging habits related to this item, it was bookmarked by 56 members. Despite there being 61 different tags applied to the item, there was a high level of agreement between users regarding the ‘aboutness’ of the article.  As you can see from the chart below, after the first three most popular tags there is a big drop-off in numbers.

In fact, should the third and fourth tags be combined (the latter is the plural form of the former) there is an even bigger drop-off.  Furthermore, it appears that the first three tags (four if ‘folksonomies’ was incorporated) were applied by around 50% of those that tagged the item.  This suggests that, despite popular conception, agreement can be reached regarding the ‘aboutness’ of a document without the guidance of an all knowing professional.

Delicious tags for 'Metadata for the masses'

In his article, Merholz explains why he believes user-based tagging could be beneficial for organising information:

The potential benefits of free tagging should encourage practitioners to address such shortcomings [caused by inconsistencies in tagging]. In looking for a real-world analog, I thought of the foot-worn paths that appear in a landscape over time. Called “desire lines,” these trails demonstrate how a landscape’s users choose to move, which is often not on the paved paths. A smart landscape designer will let wanderers create paths through use, and then pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utility.

I think this is exactly why user-based tagging could become a useful tool.  Allowing users to freely create ‘paths’ to information would ensure that eventually a commonality will emerge.  Once this commonality has emerged it should be easier to develop a controlled language that is truly in the words of the user (rather than in the remote terminology of the ‘information professional’), making information more accessible to the average user.  Although user-based tagging does have its limitations, there is great potential there to organise large amounts of information – particularly in terms of the internet.  Ultimately our greatest concern should be making information easily accessible for the average user.  By dispensing with terminology that we are in control of and handing over a degree of control to the ‘masses’, the potential is there to attain this goal and ensure that a system that is user-friendly and relevant to the end-user emerges.

Bookmarking Websites with Delicious

I have long found that the Favourites folder on IE was not exactly the most convenient way of storing websites for future reference.  I often found that I had to go through my folders trying to find the actual link I required, all the time wondering what it was called and what folder I had actually put it in.  Many a time I eventually gave in and ended up trying to search for the site again using Google – an infuriating and wasteful way of finding that elusive website.  The need to find an alternative became even more pressing when I started my course, as I knew I would be bookmarking a lot of material.  It was at this point I finally plunged for Delicious.

I have to admit, I came to Delicious a little late.  It was already widely used by the time I came round to finally signing up for an account.  However, no sooner had I joined than I wished that I had signed up for an account a long time ago.  Quite frankly, once you have signed up for a Delicious account, you wonder why you have put up with IE Favourites for so long.  So, what actually is Delicious?  How does it work?  What are the benefits of using it as your library of bookmarks?

Once you sign up for an account with Delicious, you have the option to download a toolbar direct to your browser.  After downloading, you can simply add a website to your Delicious links at the press of a button.  Nice and simple.  The downloaded toolbar also has a number of other neat features, like a list of your most recent bookmarked items  and the ability to see your links in a sidebar.  The thing that really stands out on Delicious, is the ability to add tags to items that are bookmarked to your account.  This enables the user to retrieve links quickly and easily.  The tags can either be simple one word tags, or word combinations using ‘_’ or ‘-’.  When searching for a specific tag, you can simply click on a tag to present a list of items tagged with that specific term.  You can then drill down even further by adding another tag into the mix.  So, for example, you may click on the tag ‘football’ and get a list of items related to football.  You may then decide that you want to find the links that are related to Italian football, so you would just click on the tag ‘Italy’.  You would then be presented with all the links that have been tagged with the terms ‘football’ and ‘Italy’ (which should hopefully relate to both these tags).  This is really handy for finding items quickly and efficiently.  Unlike IE folders, you don’t have to indulge in a fruitless search through a sea of links and folders that give you very few clues about what they relate to.  You can even add a short description on Delicious to make it even easier to find the right item.

There is also the ability to browse through tags that have been applied by other users in order to find items that might also be useful for future reference.  And, if you discover a fellow account holder with similar interests, you can add them to your network and keep up-to-date with what they are bookmarking.  As a result, it is possible to not only organise your bookmarks, but also to discover new resources that may not have encountered before.  Delicious enables a degree of knowledge sharing not previously possible on the internet.

There have been arguments amongst some that the idea of individuals tagging items would be a nightmare for someone wanting to find a particular resource.  After all, if everyone applied there own tags to an individual bookmark, there would be chaos, right?  How could you guarantee that you could find all the weblinks that you were after if there is no consistency in the way users ‘tag’ their items?  Well, this isn’t as much as a problem as you might think.  It turns out there is a high level of consistency to tagging the more people save a particular bookmark.

This consistency is rather helped by the fact that Delicious suggests tags that may be appropriate for the item that you have bookmarked.  These suggestions tend to be the most popular tags which therefore helps to standardise the cataloguing of weblinks.  Even if these are ignored, however, there is still some degree of consistency.  Generally speaking, there is a tendency for people to tag things in a similar way.  As more people tag an item, a commonality amongst tags starts to emerge.  Although there is a variety in the number of tags that are applied, there does tend to be a small number of tags that will consistently appear across all users.  This commonality suggests that user-based tagging is not as anarchic as one might be lead to believe.  In fact, as Merholz has argued, such systems are rather like ‘desire lines’ that emerge over time in a landscape.  Once it becomes clear that a commonality has developed amongst users tags, it is easy to direct them to the appropriate tag (rather like a controlled vocabulary).  Considering the rapid growth of the information that is available on the internet, such a system is very useful indeed.

In short, I would highly recommend that if you haven’t already got an account with Delicious to organise your bookmarks, you should set one up as soon as possible.  It has numerous benefits when compared to other methods of organising your favourites (like IE folders), not least the ease of access.  And despite some concerns about the ability for everyone to freely apply tags to their bookmarks, the fact that a degree of commonality emerges suggests that these fears are unfounded.  Considering that there are now well over one trillion unique urls, organising content for retrieval is absolutely vital.

Bookmarking Favourites

Finding the right resource to resolve a query at the enquiry desk can sometimes be a tricky affair, particularly if the methods for bookmarking aren’t exactly helpful.  Members of staff who are faced with queries that require access to a specific website are often left to flounder as they root around various sub-folders amongst their Favourites bookmarks on Internet Explorer.  For inexperienced members of staff, this can be an exasperating situation.  However, there are a variety of tools that are available to efficiently direct members of staff to appropriate internet resources.

Perhaps the most widely used bookmarking tool is Delicious.  For a long time, I was oblivious to what Delicious could actually do.  I saw the links at the bottom of various pages, but had no idea as to the value of the tool itself.  Eventually I decided to ‘take the plunge’ and see what it has to offer.  There are certainly a number of advantages for using Delicious in the context of an enquiry desk.  Firstly, there is the ability to tag links with subject headings.  Provided the links are tagged properly (and that is the key), it can inform the user of exactly what information is contained on that link.  This has a massive advantage over folders on your browser as, although they indicate what site they link to, they do not reveal what information these sites contain.  From an enquiry desk perspective, this is invaluable.  Staff are no longer required to plough through a variety of links before they find what they want, by clicking on an appropriate tag, they can find the information they want far quicker.  This means better service delivery as the information is located faster, and the user doesn’t have to deal with an increasingly frustrated member of staff, desperately trying to find the right information.

An additional benefit to Delicious is the fact that links can be viewed on any computer.  Should I see a link at home that I think might be valuable in an enquiry desk context, I can simply add it to my account and then visit the site at work should I have the appropriate query.  Likewise, should I be at work and discover a useful website, I can then access it at home at a later date.  In terms of public libraries, this is even more useful as different libraries across the same authority can add links that they find useful and thus share them with members of staff in other libraries.  This also means that should members of staff have a particular expertise in one subject area (in terms of knowledge of useful internet resources), that expertise can be shared with people throughout the authority.  A massive advantage to effective service delivery.

Although there are a number of benefits to this form of organising internet links, it is not without its problems.  User tagging is a very useful tool, as long as everyone tagged links in the same way.  What might be seen as an obvious tag for one member of staff, might not be so obvious for another.  As a result, members of staff might overlook important resources that can deal with the query and will consequently be no better off than using the old-fashioned method of bookmarking.  This is perhaps the biggest problem in allowing members of staff to add their own links and tag them as they see fit.  Without some form of central control, there would be inconsistency which would lead to inefficiency.  A hundred members of staff means a hundred different ways to tag one item.  Take these two photos from FlickR, both of roughly the same subject:

The first photo is tagged as follows:

portugal holiday 2008 lisbon 25deAbrilBridge tagus suspension

The second is tagged:

25deAbrilBridge lisbon portugal suspensionbridge cristo-rei rivertagus almada franciscofrancodesousa antoniolino

As you can see, there are a number of subtle differences in  how the two are tagged.   The first one uses the tag ‘suspension’ whilst the second uses ‘suspensionbridge’.  Clearly in the case of the first set of tags, care will need to be taken when searching.  Someone looking for ‘suspension bridges’ will obviously not retrieve this image.  Likewise, if someone was looking to find examples of work by Francisco Franco de Sousa, they would also miss the first image.

Taking all of this into account, imagine the problems that would occur if members of staff each tagged links themselves, the problems would be multiplied many times over.  As a result, the utilisation of Delicious would lose its advantage over folders stored on the browser.  That said, if it was used in a controlled manner, Delicious could be a very useful resource for public library enquiry desks and a welcome aid to those less-comfortable in dealing with internet based queries.