Social Bookmarking & Tagging

I had a look at Delicious and Diigo, and settled on the latter only because it gave me the option of running an applet instead of installing stuff into my browser, and didn't require me to have a yahoo account.

Diigo is very handy, it allows you to take your bookmarks with you to pretty much anywhere you can get a computer with internet access. The tagging helps to organise all your bookmarks, a lot like subject headings in cataloging. You can further order the pages into lists. I haven't accumulated enough for lists yet but have been making a conscious effort to mark interesting pages I visit a lot, so the list feature is nice. Diigo lets you highlight portions of pages and bookmark only that, which is handy especially if it is a text heavy page. It won't bookmark a highlighted image or table and translate as it is formatted, and it won't bookmark some images, e.g. if i find an image through google image search it doesn't bookmark the image itself but will bookmark the page it is from. I'm not sure how this can help in terms of bibliographic software like End Note as I've never used it before, but I'll see how it goes when I do eventually use it.

Now LibraryThing is a great excuse to unleash my bad taste on everyone via the widget I added on the side. LibraryThing itself is fantastic, it's great for reader advisory. I've been using it to get recommended reads, and it's handy to see all the tags associated with the books and authors you like, you can add your own and catalog your own library that way. Socially, it connects you to people that read the same things you read, and it opens up a world where you can create discussion boards and chat to groups of like-minded people. In a lot of ways it works like Fiction Connection or NoveList, but free, without being joined to a library that has bought access to these databases.

GuruLib is okay, I guess. Navigation-wise it's atrocious, it is not user friendly at all and the display is so PC, the layout is not user friendly and is kinda ugly to look at. Oh, who am I kidding? I really don't think it's okay. The purpose of the site is what I'm guessing to be similar to LibraryThing, only navigating it is really hard because so many things are just not very intuitive. I would click to a point where I couldn't find my way back to my library only to realise it was my usename up at the top, in really small writing. Aside from the fact that you can add other mediums to your library like movies and music, it's just such a pain the ass to add stuff and go back and change its settings. The widget is a standard one but unless you can adjust the HTML, you really can't custom it much from the site. You know what GuruLib reminds me of? See if you can navigate website for the Melbourne Museum of Printing. Might make you want to gouge your eyes out... Thank god they have a new site (under development).