(no subject)

[arcanetrivia]

Can someone explain to me what the big deal is about del.icio.us and why it's so horrible that Yahoo is "sunsetting" it? I used it briefly as part of a project I was doing for work a couple of years ago, so it's not that I don't know what it does, I just don't get what's so wonderful about it. (It would seem that, like Facebook, I am not in need of the service it provides.)

I read some comments on a blog post about it which were like "noooo where will I keep all my fic bookmarks??" and I was like um, in "faves" lists in your account on whatever fic site? Or in bookmarks in your browser if it doesn't have that function or you can't get an account? (aside peeve: I wish there were a way for me to get a skyehawke account so I could fave things. I understand invite-only as quality control, but...) And "nooo how will I find fic?" really didn't make sense to me - I found del.icio.us very awkward as a discovery tool and exploring communities on LJ has probably been the best-results method for me on that (maybe other fandoms operate very differently to Harry Potter, I dunno).

Comments

[venturous]

it saves bookmarks on the cloud with tags, and one can search all the tags. I think there is more to it than that, but this alone has been mighty useful to me, as i jump around from various computers, browsers and platforms.

[arcanetrivia]

I use three different computers, work, home, and a laptop, and I keep my bookmarks synchronized between them. Do you mean you commonly find yourself using "one-off" computers, public ones, computers belonging to friends etc. ?

[venturous]

I've never mastered the synch business. no, Iused to have home & work, now its desktop/laptop.

[arcanetrivia]

The point of that question being "a place where you would not otherwise have access to your own bookmarks", so having them online somewhere would be helpful.

Firefox's Sync is pretty easy (although I didn't like the aspect of having to create an account for it rather than being able to use my own webspace as I could with an extension I used to use) and I hear it's the same in Google Chrome.

[arcanetrivia]

N.B. I am not disparaging yours or anyone else's way of doing things - just that I am apparently not the intended audience for this service.

[elf]

Check out metafandom's delicious. Or the Trek Reboot Kink Meme. Delicious really shines as a group-bookmarks site, a place for multiple people to save bookmarks to the same account. scans_daily and 50books_poc both starting using it as a way to tag posts when they went past LJ & DW's tag limits.

It also works as a site-wide finder for multiple tags: you can look for a set of tags like NC-17 clex, and seeing how many people have added that link (the number on the right) tells you something about how popular that story is.

Many authors & reccers have all their fic linked there, going back many years on a bunch of different sites, and if Del goes away (I hear maybe it's not going away, just no longer going to be part of Yahoo), those stories will have no central finding point.

But mainly, the issue is that many thousand people use Delicious nearly constantly; if it vanishes, it'll drastically disrupt their web use.

[arcanetrivia]

Delicious really shines as a group-bookmarks site, a place for multiple people to save bookmarks to the same account.

Didn't know you could do that.

[community profile] scans_daily and [livejournal.com profile] 50books_poc both starting using it as a way to tag posts when they went past LJ & DW's tag limits.

Wow, I've never gotten near those, I don't think.

[accioslash]

Delicious really shines as a group-bookmarks site, a place for multiple people to save bookmarks to the same account.

This is how the majority of fandoms newsletters gather the links to create their newsletters. There is a program created by murkins that converts the delicious links into the newletter. If I gather links daily, I can create the sshp_prophet in 5 minutes using the program. Without it, it takes a good 3-4 hours.

Also, I've found it less useful than snarryficfind or my flist for HP recs. But in fandoms like Reboot, Merlin, Inception, SPN, Sherlock and others, I can do a quick search and find the most bookmarked fics to help me sort through to the (arguably) best fics that fandom has to offer. That way, I'm not as tied to the whims of a single reccer. It's not always the case that the most bookmarked is the best, but it's happened often enough that I prefer it to a random rec on my flist.

[ariadneelda]

I hadn't seen the appeal of Delicious until I started using it a couple of years ago. I love being able to bookmark my favourite fics, art and vids all in one place. Also, the organisation freak in me loves the ability to use multiple tags on everything, so I can easily find anything I'm looking for. I could use my browser to bookmark things but I don't want to clutter my folders and subfolders of bookmarks that are already too many with stuff I've already seen/read. And although I save everything I like in my computer, I never used to know where I found a piece of art or a vid since I didn't save the links (only with fic I did that).

As for looking for new fic, I prefer searching on Delicious than browsing through LJ communities. In HP, I know where to find good fic (I never look for HP fic on Delicious), but in other fandoms I don't. I can search by tag(s) and look for certain pairings, or certain anything. And I can see how many people have saved something, their comments on it (if any), and that's proved very helpful to me for finding good fic.

[arcanetrivia]

And although I save everything I like in my computer, I never used to know where I found a piece of art or a vid since I didn't save the links (only with fic I did that).

I use a file naming scheme with the person's username, a short code for the site it was found on (DA, LJ, AO3, whatever), and then the title. It's not a direct link (I paste that into saved fics), but it's usually enough to be able to go back and find it if it's still there.

I can search by tag(s) and look for certain pairings, or certain anything.

I find it a little clumsy because you have to hit on the right nomenclature (just as in community naming for various ships) - some people have used snape/black, snape/sirius, severus/sirius, snack, severus sirius (without slashes) ... and that's just a ship name. There are too many other variations even to contemplate if you're trying to find a specific rating or genre. It's unfortunately not a controlled vocabulary.

To each their own; as I said, I am apparently not the target audience and so I wasn't getting what the big deal was here.

[magnetic_pole]

Seconding the comment about group bookmarking. I discovered delicious in fandom but use it in my classes, where students bookmark and tag articles and sites all semester, in preparation for group presentations in the final weeks of the semester. I also use to to search for fic in non-HP fandoms. I'll be very sad to see it go, if that's what happens. M.

[fera_festiva]

Gah! I just wrote a lovely long comment and then my phone crashed. Let's try again...

Anyway, the gist was: I use Delicious to bookmark not only fic but all kinds of other things, like recipes and articles and craft resources. And not everything I bookmark has the option to favourite on the site (e.g. when I did my MSc research I bookmarked stuff that I then used as my corpus). And then, when I come back to my bookmarks later it's often from a different computer (I often bookmark interesting-looking fic if it shows up on my flist while I'm at work, then read it on my phone later when I'm not at work). So overall it's much easier to have everything in one place I can access from anywhere.

Either way, Delicious is now claiming it isn't closing after all, so. I hope this is true. :/

(Sorry for any typos btw - sending this from my phone, a device I don't entirely trust, mainly because I can't see where it keeps its brain...)

[arcanetrivia]

I use Delicious to bookmark not only fic but all kinds of other things, like recipes and articles and craft resources.

Well sure, but I just use my browser bookmarks for that.

And not everything I bookmark has the option to favourite on the site

(quoting original post) "Or in bookmarks in your browser if it doesn't have that function or you can't get an account"...

when I did my MSc research I bookmarked stuff that I then used as my corpus

...although I can see it being handy as a way to create a link list you can then send others to see without having to actually code up a web page or blog post.

And then, when I come back to my bookmarks later it's often from a different computer (I often bookmark interesting-looking fic if it shows up on my flist while I'm at work, then read it on my phone later when I'm not at work)

I just synchronize my bookmarks between my three computers. Granted I can't sync to the iPad (I don't have a phone), but in the eight months we've had it, I've only run into a situation where I wished I wished I could access my "to read" list on it a couple times.

a device I don't entirely trust, mainly because I can't see where it keeps its brain...

lol.

[fera_festiva]

I just synchronize my bookmarks between my three computers.

Ah, see, that's where I feel Delicious has an advantage - I don't have to sync anything (and I wouldn't be able to sync with my phone anyway). It's also useful if I need to use another computer, like my boyfriend's netbook or a work machine other than my usual one. Admittedly this is partly due to laziness on my part, heh.

The other advantage is the tagging system - you can filter by multiple tags at once, which I like because if I'm in the mood for something femmeslash AND fluffy AND rated R, I can browse everything with all those tags. Also, something that used to bother me about browser bookmarking was that it used the folders/subfolders system - so, I don't know, if a fic had both R/S and H/D in it then I'd have to decide where to put it (and I hate having things in more than one place).

IDK. I think this is a YMMV thing - I prefer web based bookmarking and you like browser based, which is fair enough, you know? But, since you asked, there are my two cents. :)

[arcanetrivia]

I don't have to sync anything

Once having set it up, it runs on auto.

The other advantage is the tagging system

I don't tag my bookmarks; I sort them in folders. Sometimes I think I should get around to tagging them because then I don't have to duplicate an entry to make it "live" in more than one place, but because I did not do it from the start (which was before tagging was possible) the amount of data entry required has just been too daunting.

I think this is a YMMV thing

Pretty much. As I said in the OP, it seems I don't want or need the service they provide, so I was kind of going "huh, I don't get it".