Physician, heal thyself – Bookmarking with Delicious

As I enter a period of deliberate downtime over the summer to recharge my batteries (more on this later I hope) I’ve started thinking about my own social media strategy a bit more. When I started the ASH-10 blog last year it was in a bit of rush and it took a good few months for me to figure out exactly what it was for. This probably had something to do with me not knowing exactly what I was doing for a living or where I was going with this stuff. Recently I’ve started to get my head around that and, naturally, my online activities around ASH-10 have become a lot more focused. Now I need to put some systems in place to capture that activity, archive it so it can ferment and amplify it so it works more effectively for me. Simple stuff really and I’m expecting the solutions to be fairly simple too.

One of the first problems I had was the absurd number of web pages I have open in my browser, often filling between 30 and 60 tabs by the end the day. These are links I come across in Google Reader or on Twitter which I think are interesting and want to do something with but don’t have the time. My big problem here is I often have too much to say about a subject and feel I can only do it justice with a 1500 word essay. The solution is to use a system which forces me into brevity. I’ve already been doing this to some extent by posting links to Twitter throughout the day (which is also where the majority of my audience is so it’s by no means a poor strategy) but archiving Twitter posts is next to impossible to do usefully. I could import all my tweets somewhere but there’s too much noise and chat on there. Better to find a new system to run alongside it.

Enter Delicious, the social bookmarking service which is very hack-able – see my post from January about how I track comments I leave with Delicious for an taster of how it works and what you can do with it. My new strategy is fairly simple and goes like this:

When I read something I think is of interest to ASH-10 readers I hit the “Tag” button on my browser toolbar (part of the Firefox plugin – they also do one for Internet Explorer) which brings up a form to fill in:

I can edit the title of the page to something more useful and add tags to categorise the link for future reference but the key thing here is the Notes field where I can add no more the 1000 characters to describe it. No chance of verbosity here. I can get my thoughts or opinions out there without spending the whole night wittering away.

The most important thing, though, is to tag those links I want to use on ash10.com with “ash10″. You’ll see why in a minute.

Now I’ve got a load of bookmarks in Delicious and an empty browser. Lovely. But since hardly anyone checks my Delicious account (as far as I know) they’re not really doing anything for me. I need to take that data and put it somewhere else. Like, say, this blog.

I use the WordPress blogging software to run this site which I’ve installed on my own server. This takes a bit more technical knowhow than simply using WordPress.com but it gives me much more control over the functionality. For example, I can install plugins to do all sorts of whizzy things such as take my Delicious bookmarks and turn them into blog posts. The most popular plugin to do this is Postalicious which I have set up to check delicious.com/peteashton/ every hour, look for any bookmarks tagged ash10, import them into a blog post and, if it has more than three by midday, publish it.

So this:

Becomes this:

Without me having to lift a finger.

So, in summary I spend a few minutes for each link writing a brief piece of commentary about it and produce the following:

• A knowledge bank of useful pages on the web categorised by subject (want to see everything I’ve bookmarked for ASH-10 about Twitter or WordPress plugins I’ve noted?)
• A daily newswire of social media news and opinion for readers of the ASH-10 blog.
• A process which forces me to codify and communicate my thoughts.

That’s just the beginning. Because my bookmarks are available in a structured form on a public website I can do any number of other things with them. I could turn them into a daily email using Feedburner, import them into a Tumblr blog to reach the community there, use Twitterfeed to auto-post them to Twitter (not necessary since I intend to do this in a more conversational way, though I do a similar thing with my blog posts through @petepump) or get a bit more adventurous and do a mashup using Yahoo Pipes.

But for this will do for now. It captures my thoughts in a sustainable way and delivers them to a wider audience. Problem solved.

If you’re using Delicious to solve a problem, or have any questions about how it might be used, the comments box is yours…