Del.icio.us is kind of neat.

If you haven't used it, Del.icio.us is a website where you can post bookmarks. They're not much for security, what with anyone who wanders by being able to look at your bookmarks, but that's really not a big deal. It is kind of nice to look at other people's bookmarks, especially if you can find someone who has similar interests. Browsing other people's bookmarks reminds me of the Yahoo! of old, when it was mostly a big collection of fun websites to go look at.

Most web browsers seem to organize bookmarks hierarchically. Just like Netscape 1.0. Did Mosaic do this too? I don't remember, but I'll bet it did. Why do they do this? Probably because programmers love filesystems: The Abstraction That Will Not Die. Del.icio.us instead organizes with tags, a topic I've beat upon before. Why are tags better than hierarchy? Well, if you organize everything in your world as locations on a single, straight line they are probably not different. Unfortunately things are more interconnected than that.

Does Amazon.com go under books or shopping? Ok, in books under shopping. King County Library? Under books, but not shopping. So books should be above shopping. But what about Buy.com? It should go in shopping but not books. It turns out that everything works this way. Well, nearly everything. Things that all can be lined up on a straight line can generally be indexed handily with a hierarchy.

Del.icio.us allows you to assign whatever tags you want to to each bookmark. Then it lists all your tags--either alphabetically or by how often they're used--and you can click on one. Click on "shopping" and poof! It's just showing shopping related bookmarks. Still too many? Now it shows tags that are on stuff with "shopping". Click on "books" and there is Amazon.com. But you can also buy books at Barnes and Noble, or some other places, so they're listed too. My only complaint is that with it being web-based, it's unusably slow.

Hmm, maybe a web browser could just download and cache the Del.icio.us bookmark list, and allow a fast way to browse them. That'd be pretty good. And why not keep track of how often different tags get used and make them show up bigger in the list? That way they'd be easier to click on! And when adding a bookmark, maybe it could do some kind of Baysean analysis to determine which tags should apply, and suggest those. Hmm, I smell a little Firefox plugin project here.