So I’ve been on kind of a social media bender lately, as y’all can probably tell. I’ve been out of the loop for a while and am months if not years behind on a lot of stuff. (“Hey, did you hear they’ve got pictures on that intarnet thing now?”) Anyway, this weekend I decided to sit down and take a good hard look at the big names in social bookmarking, namely Delicious, Digg, and Stumbleupon. The final results were thus:
Delicious: The winner for plain old storing bookmarks. Delicious has advanced tagging features to easily find things, and is old school enough that I’m not worried about my account disappearing into the ether any time soon. The list of top bookmarks overall is kind of meh as a jumpoff point for mindless web surfing, but does lean towards neat web and graphic design finds. The default setup for the Firefox plugin will spew crap all over your hotbars, but a little fussing with the options settled things down nicely.
Digg: The winner for denoting neat finds. The interface is really simple, particularly if you’re not submitting a fresh Digg yourself: go to the website, click “Digg”. Voila! Your newly marked fave is saved to your account and added to the overall totals. The user base seems to trend towards the Farkish audience, and posts about Linux, comic books, and hot babes get up the list pretty quickly. It’s still a pretty solid place to start your browsing day, though, and the new section that recommends links based on your Digg history is awesome. The Firefox plug in is kinda neat, but not really necessary unless you are a hardcore Digg user.
Stumbleupon: I liked the idea of this site. Similar to Digg, it wants to store your bookmarks and be a ‘hot or not’ for websites. It also emphasizes the “social” part of social bookmarking more than the other two. And the Stumbleupon button is nifty! You feed the site your subject preferences, and at least 66% of the time it sent me somewhere cool. Unfortunately, overall the site comes across as more of a dating website than anything, which turned me off. If I’m just looking for somewhere online to store my bookmarks, do I really want to be asked in my profile about my body type or the amount I drink? Stop judging me, Stumbleupon! Pass!
So I ended up with a combination of Delicious and Digg, and the Shareaholic Firefox extension to make using both easier. The way I break it down is that if it’s something that I will want to find and look at on a fairly regular basis, like a neat blog, I’ll stick it in Delicious and tag it carefully. If it’s a site that I think is notably interesting, but I probably won’t look at it again or at least not for a long time, I’ll Digg it.
And thus ends my primer on social bookmarking.
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Link dump:
9 Comics to Read After Seeing Watchmen. Everyone is all blah blah bad word of mouth blah, and I think they’re clearly insane. It was a GREAT movie, all three hours of it. I was a fan of the book, but not a fangirl, and felt entirely satisfied by the movie treatment.
Chocolate cake in five minutes, using a coffee mug and a microwave. Now this is my kinda cooking.
PS: I thought about putting a pretty graphic or two in this post to increase the visual appeal and better attract readers, but then I realized I don’t care. Suck that, Web 2.0.
