Don’t blame yourself, blame the tool. Nobody tags consistently (except for the hyper-excessively anal), so a “better” del.icio.us would make that irrelevent. Said another way, never blame the user; blame the user interaction designer for having a less than optimal user interaction design.

Anyway, I was just using del.icio.us for exactly the type of reason Jon starts out his post discussing, i.e. tagging some URLs so I could send a list of items to a friend, and I identified six *more* things I think del.icio.us should do:

1.) I want a thumbnail of the website so I can view a list of my URLs and hopefully remember the site where the URL came from.

2.) I want an expandable/collapsible view for each URL where the URL’s page is displayed in an iframe below the URL. I want to be able to expand & collapse them individually as well as be able to expand & collapse all at once.

3.) I want to be able to rate each one in the context of a tag. i.e. if I have articles tagged with “AJAX” I’d like to be able to rate 1 to 5 for the tag “AJAX”, even if I tagged the URL with something else, like “REST” (IOW, maybe I’d want to say it is a “5″ for REST but only a “3″ for “AJAX”)

4.) I’d like to be able to define the order in which they are listed on a by-tag basis, and also if there are sticky ones (i.e. “always show these two first, then the rest in reverse chronological order or the rest by descending rating, etc.)

5.) When I tag a URL I’d like del.icio.us to do a little comparision to other tagged URLs on the system with the same base URL and ask if I should tag what might be the canonical URL instead (i.e. if I try to tag a URL that has a marketing tracking code it would be nice for del.icio.us to notice that the base URL is the same and that frankly the content for the one with tracking code and the one without are essentially the same as well and have del.icio.us ask me which one I want similar to how Digg works on news item submission.)

6.) And lastly I’d like as a site owner to be able to ask del.icio.us to re-evaluate my URLs for 301 redirects on a site, a path, and/or a invididual URL basis. For this not to cause heartburn for users, they would need to add two options when tagging: “Update URL is URL changes” vs. “Never update URL” and “Delete URL if site goes offline for 30+ days” vs. “Never delete URL.”

Anyway, add these 6 capabilities with the prior 6 I quotes and I think del.icio.us’ usage would skyrocket.

Belated HNY and best for ’08 John; got behind the curve these past weeks.

Laterally related, a new study [1] shows (ironically?) that folk who create formal teachings resources are themselves usually self-taught and usually engage in more informal teaching/learning processes. Which for me a) shows why I’m out of sync with them historically, since my theory is in-formed by the actualities of my experience and practice, and b) makes me wonder if they’re only (only?!) responding to market forces in what they’re producing.

cheers
–bentrem

[1] http://informl.com/2007/12/18/the-cobblers-children/

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls:

Should have been:

http://del.icio.us/mikeschinkel/urls