I have confessed on Moe’s Blog(German) that I have used social bookmarking mostly in my direction so far. I store my bookmarks. Sometimes I browse the buzz lists, but I don’t bookmark in order to share something, I bookmark in order to find something myself at a later time.
Danny Sullivan looks at an older Steve Rubel post about tags. I am linking to it because it’s hesitant about tagging though lately everybody seems to think tagging is the solution to all the problems.
For example, somebody suggested that the folder structure on your harddisk should be taggable so you’d find your stuff and stuff related to it a lot easier. Well firstly, if you don’t know where you put it, you should keep better folder-hygiene. Secondly, with the various desktop search clients out there and especially with Tiger’s Spotlightfunction – who needs tags on your own machine? Danny’s remark about exact labeling, e.g. are you looking for the tag, blog, blogs or blogging, points directly to a problem I have with del.icio.us: you really have to service your own tags to make the service work for you. If I remember correctly, Jon Udell does that himself during his how-to-work-with-del.icio.us screencast. If your own system depended on that you’d be servicing your harddisk tags 24/7. And for the search on the web, it is just too imprecise. Just YaGoohoo!gle a bit, my guess is that’ll give you better results – and quicker.