So it was with some delight that I stumbled upon Favthumbs. Do the internets really need another del.icio.us visualization tool? Maybe not, but it turns out that this one works for me. Since most of the stuff I’m doing these days is design-based, and being a generally visual person, images tend to imprint themselves on my brain better than words. If I bookmarked your website last week because you’ve done some interesting stuff with search boxes, I can guarantee you that I won’t remember the name of your site or anything I read on your page (rendering a search of my bookmarks fruitless), but I’ll probably remember the colours and layout. So a carousel (à la iTunes) or grid display of my del.icio.us bookmarks, complete with thumbnails, is genius. It’s pretty much exactly what the visually-biased like me need.

Sorry to be so screenshot-y lately, but I couldn’t pass this one up. The above image is a tag cloud of my del.icio.us bookmarks generated by wordle. You should have heard the loud gasp that issued from my lips upon seeing this image. Why? Because IT IS MY LIFE represented in a tag cloud. Well, my life at the moment, at any rate. Here’s the what’s what on that:

• I’ve read that “to read” (or some variation thereof) is arguably everyone’s most frequently applied tag. As you can see from the image above, it’s definitely mine, and it always has been. This is particularly poignant at this very moment in my life because it feels like I’m not doing much more than wading in a pool of good intentions, gathering data and content that could potentially have some impact on me if only I had time to digest it all. You see, I’m one of those odd types that actually removes the “toread” tag once I’ve read something, so the fact that it is, by far, my most frequently applied tag drives home the point that I’m not reading enough. At the rate I’m going, I might never get through the “toread” backlog and that makes me disproportionately unhappy.
• Of course, one of the main reasons why I’m not getting to all that juicy, bookmarked content is because I’m teaching my LIS course again this term (“lis9763“). It’s the first time I’ve taught it during back-to-back terms and I’m starting to wonder if that was a good idea. In some ways it works well: I got into a groove balancing it all last term, and that’s continued nicely into this term. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work and requires me to drop a few other things from my plate (to wit “toread”; see also: dust bunnies running amok in my house). At any rate, the relative weighting of “lis9763″ in my tag cloud is spot-on.
• And then there’s that little project that is swallowing me whole at work: our website redesign (“redesign“). I’m in the thick of it at the moment, and when you’re in the thick of something so huge, with a deadline that looms (September!), you have to keep reminding yourself how much (a lot) and for how long (years) you’ve wanted to blow up the website and start over.  I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally be doing the work (this is my favourite project ever), but boy howdy, it is all-consuming. Even more so than its relative size indicates in my tag cloud. “toread” will necessarily remain on hold for a few more months.

So, there it is, my life distilled into three tags. I am at once horrified (I’ve GOT to get our more), vindicated (so THAT’s where all my time is going!), and amused (O, tags! you never fail me!) by it.

• La Grange Park Library
• Lansing Public Library – syndicates their del.icio.us feed right on their home page (along with their blog feed)!
• Maui Community College Library – syndicates their feed on their “About” page, under the heading “Our Current Interests”. Sounds like a library with living, breathing human beings at work. Imagine! (note: they’re also on MySpace)
• San Mateo Public Library – links organized in Dewey bundles!
• Seldovia Public Library – syndicates their feed in their blog sidebar.
• Thomas Ford Memorial Library – syndicates their feed on a neat little links page.

I had a couple of people email me/comment about using social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and Furl to collect and share resources amongst staff, which is another great use of the technology, in my opinion. At my library, I co-chair our Web Team with a colleague and since we both do a lot of scouring and hoarding of links, I set up a del.icio.us account as a central location for those links. We’ve got the feed syndicated on a couple of our Web Team pages for all to see (internally, the pages are on our Intranet), and we’ve shared the login details with the rest of the Team in the hope that they will post the results of their web meanderings too. As far as I’m concerned, del.icio.us is easily the simplest, quickest, and most efficient tool out there for this sort of information sharing.

Do you know of any public libraries using del.icio.us as an alternative to list of recommended websites? We’re thinking of doing this and are curious to know if/how others are doing it.

A great question! I’m curious about academic libraries using del.icio.us too. If your library is on del.icio.us, do let us know (via comment below or email). Thank you!

Update: some good stuff in the comments. Thanks & keep ‘em coming!