My New Recommended Reading Lists

The more I use the social bookmarking tool del.icio.us, the more I’m getting to like it – especially when it saves me work.

One task I’m particularly compulsive about is sharing with CONTENTIOUS readers links to interesting sites, articles, tools, and books. For awhile I’d been presenting these as my “grab bag” articles, but that process was too labor-intensive for me to maintain.

So now I’ve figured out how to use del.icio.us to keep you up to date on all the cool content I’m encouraging you to explore…

Look over at the right-hand column of any page in this weblog. See the section that says Other Goodies? That’s your resource for all my recommended reading.

The first goodie, recommended online reading, takes you to my main del.icio.us page where you can find every link I wanted to share, with the most recent additions listed first.

You’ll see I have an extensive list of categories (tags) which I use to describe each link, and I also include a brief text description or excerpt for each link. Clicking on any tag in my tag list will produce a list of all articles I’ve given that particular tag.

There is also a feed available for each tag, so you can follow just the topics you like. You can also see who else in del.icio.us bookmarked that same link, and check out their lists as well. Very cool!

The next goodie, feeds Amy reads, is the complete list of all the webfeeds to which I currently subscribe. This is an OPML file, which you download and import into a feed reader. I’m warning you, this is a long list. I currently subscribe to about 300-400 feeds. They’re categorized, that helps a bit.

Next, recommended books, takes you directly to a list of books which I’ve read and highly recommend. I tell you why I recommend each book. These are my del.icio.us links bearing the books-read tag.

Next, books I’m currently reading is pretty self-explanatory. This is just what’s in my pile at the moment – everything on my del.icio.us list bearing the books-reading tag. If I end up not liking a book, I’ll say why (if it’s important) or I’ll remove it from my del.icio.us page (if it’s not worth sharing at all).

Books I want also is pretty explanatory. It’s my book wish list, which I maintain via BestWebBuys (not del.icio.us). If you ever feel the urge to be generous toward me, books are always my favorite gift.

On my radar is a list of items I’m checking out or have checked out in the past, not necessarily recommendations. I keep this list in my Furl archive. This used to be where I kept track of items to include in my grab bag, but del.icio.us is a better solution for sharing links. So now, consider my Furl archive a record of my curiousity, sprawling over a wide range of topics.

…Anyway, I hope this explains what happened to my grab bags. I know my grab bags were pretty popular, and I still may do special ones as warranted. I know some people will miss that form of presentation. However, I had to go with a system I could maintain. It’s always a tradeoff. Ultimately, I think del.icio.us offers more benefits for recommending links.

What do you think? Comment below!

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This entry was written by Amy Gahran and posted on March 14, 2005 at 1:43 pm and filed under Amy's Adventures, Amy's Grab Bag (quick notes), Feeds (RSS), Labels and Metadata, Resources. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Comments are closed, but you can leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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4 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

I’ve imitated your idea. I just launched my own blog (This Might Be Miscellany) and have a “currently reading” booklist in the sidebar. After reading this post, I got acquainted with del.icio.us and duplicated my booklist there, using the same “books-reading” tag that you use. We appear to be the only two people on del.icio.us using that tag; visiting http://del.icio.us/tag/books-reading brings up our reading lists intertwingled.

Del.icio.us seems to be very cool for maintaining public lists like that. I guess the next logical step for me would be to write a Perl script or something that will pull down the del.icio.us list and post it automatically in my blog sidebar, saving me duplication of effort.

[Reply]

1. John Remmers on March 20th, 2005 at 6:00 pm
Thanks, Amy. I’ve just started working with Furl, and you had me wondering if there were some crucial flaw in it that I overlooked.

“So far, Furl doesn’t allow sub-categories.”

If you mean derived categories like “Blog+Friend”, I didn’t realize that. And having confirmed it, what a bummer. Not a deal-breaker for me, but a definite limitation.

Y’know, I was scrolling back through your Furl archive, and I noticed you don’t ever seem to use multiple categories… every item is slotted into a single topic. Is there a reason you’re keeping things that way?

[Reply]

2. Roger Benningfield on March 16th, 2005 at 5:59 am
Roger wrote, “I’ve been playing around with a transition to Furl away from del.icio.us. What’s leading you in the opposite direction?”

Let me be clear — I’m definitely NOT abandoning Furl. In fact, I’m still Furling nearly everything that I also post to del.icio.us, since I like to keep my own personal copy. (Things always move and change online, after all). So I still get to take full advantage of Furl’s admittedly superior searchability, etc.

The issue for me was with creating a recommended reading list. I don’t know if CONTENTIOUS readers realized it, but my “grab bag” articles actually required a fair amount of work. I don’t want to simply publish isolated links (which is what the WordPress bookmarklet feature allows). I prefer to group links topically. I think that context adds a lot of value.

However, when I published grab bags I realized I was pigeonholing each linked item to one category. Often, multiple categories apply. So my grab-bag approach didn’t work well in that respect.

So far, Furl doesn’t allow sub-categories. That is, in my voluminous contentious to-do Furl folder I couldn’t specify topics such as learning or marketing. If I were to start a Furl archive entirely dedicated to CONTENTIOUS (which I considered), I could have provided that level of detail and interconnectedness. Furl does offer topic-specific feeds, too.

However, the more I thought about it, I prefer to have just one Furl archive and use that to collect everything online that interests me, not just in regard to CONTENTIOUS. The prospect of starting a new Furl archive just for CONTENTIOUS seemed more onerous than starting a new del.icio.us page.

What clinched it for me was the community factor — I mean, my whole goal here is sharing, after all. It seems to me that del.icio.us is very prominent about displaying how many other people have bookmarked a particular link, and it makes it very easy for you to access those people’s own del.icio.us pages. That’s been a goldmine for me. I’ve learned a lot by following such breadcrumb trails.

As for the sharing, well I can still make comments (although of very limited length) on each item. Also, readers can choose to subscribe to feeds for specific tags via del.icio.us, as well as find items easily via the web. Tagging, rather than straightforward text searching, is the strength of del.icio.us, in my opinion.

Both Furl and del.icio.us can still use work on their user interfaces, of course.

The bummer is that I just couldn’t keep up with doing the grab bags. They were popular, but they were too much work and I ended up falling too far behind. I prefer to keep up with the times when I can.

Does that answer your question?

- Amy Gahran
Editor, CONTENTIOUS

[Reply]

3. Amy Gahran on March 15th, 2005 at 8:05 pm
“This used to be where I kept track of items to include in my grab bag, but del.icio.us is a better solution for sharing links.”

Amy: That’s interesting, ’cause I’ve been playing around with a transition to Furl away from del.icio.us. What’s leading you in the opposite direction?

For me, it’s all come down to searchability. del.icio.us is woefully bad at finding stuff I’ve bookmarked, and Furl pretty much finds things effortlessly.

[Reply]

4. Roger Benningfield on March 14th, 2005 at 6:45 pm