I dig a pony

Thing 18: Social Bookmarking

I held off doing this week of things so that my husband could participate. He has been asking me about Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Digg and I told him it was an upcoming thing. I didn't find having someone by my side helped. However it helped him because he had never seen any of the common craft videos. Those videos are good.

I already had a Delicious account (set up in another 2.0 class). It took me a little while to remember my account name, but once I found that I remembered the password. I have plans for that account, but first I have to finish tagging the hundreds of bookmarks that I’ve imported. I’m hoping that I can find some widgets that’ll allow me to finally replace my old web site with something that is easier to maintain. I know the code is around there somewhere.

Perhaps it was having someone look over my shoulder, but stumbling and digging weren’t very attractive. I did not find the StumbleUpon interface intuitively obvious and the Digg screen was awfully busy and off-putting. Maybe I’ll come back and do some more stumbling and digging another time. Unfortunately, both of these accounts rejected my 23things password so I had to create another, I’ve written them down, but it makes it less likely that I’ll remember them when I come back.

Ah, I've lost my hanger-on.

Went back to Digg and started customizing, maybe that'll clean it up some. Ew, I see it announces how old I am. I don't need that to appear on my Digg home page! Sure, I can see a service wanting to know the demographics of their users, but displaying that info? Have never seen that kind of labeling before. Thought I turned that off in the privacy settings, but it is still displaying. More than ick, these are some of the most dugg appearing even after I've edited my topic preferences.

• Moron Gets Probation for Sodomizing Dog to Death
• 11 die in crash between truck, church van headed to wedding
• 1st Person View of Getting Hit In The Nuts By A Football watch!

Those are the most egregious of the suggestions, but I'm not really interested in any of the others either. Even the ones that are barely of interest, I had already heard about through traditional news channels. Okay I'm done with Digg.

StumbleUpon is making better suggestions. Sometimes, when I'm looking to kill a little time I'll go to Wikipedia and click on the Random Article link; I've learned some interesting stuff doing that. And so I've often wished there were a similar Random Article button for the web. StumbleUpon is it without the worry that the random video will be porn.