Pinboard – A Delicious Alternative?
July 12, 2009 at 8:35 pm | In Web 2.0 | 12 CommentsTags: bookmark, Delicious, Pinboard, tagging, techcrunch, Web 2.0
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.
User-based tagging – creating chaos or a new order?
March 6, 2009 at 8:49 pm | In Cataloguing, Web 2.0 | 4 CommentsTags: Cataloguing, Delicious, information professionals, information retrieval, internet, metadata, tagging, Web 2.0
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 Favourites
October 19, 2008 at 1:41 pm | In Cataloguing | 2 CommentsTags: bookmarks, Delicious, enquiry desk, Favourites, internet, internet browser, Internet Explorer, internet resources, Public libraries, staff support, tagging
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.
Other Places
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BBC- The Guardian
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