Baaaah ...

At work, I'm generally considered to be someone who is up on Web trends. But within five years -- maybe five months -- I'll be more likely to be considered an authority on how the Web used to be.

There are two problems. I'm getting older, and the Web is getting younger. I'll never be on Facebook -- any other than a five-minute browse to see how it works would qualify as "creepy." I don't have much use for MySpace for the following reasons:

A. I'm not in a band and therefore have no music to upload.
B. I already have a blog, a home page and various other public Web presences to upload. If someone wants to find me, it's not difficult.

But I have finally felt the urge to give deli.cio.us a full-fledged try. The one who posts here known as "AG" -- far more Web-savvy than I am but also beyond the age of 20 -- will attest that I hadn't quite found a use for the "social bookmarking" thing.

I had tried something similar to deli.cio.us -- Yahoo's "My Web." That didn't go so well. It asked me to import my bookmarks, which I did. Now they're all tagged in accordance with my filing system. So a lot of things are simply "reference" or "occasional browse." All the presets that came loaded with various iterations of various browsers are tagged something like "zzzz Toshiba stuff."

Why deli.cio.us? It kept coming up. The hip people at work all swear by it. And it seems to feature in half the "extensions" in Firefox -- one that lets you save to deli.cio.us with a single click, one that lets you repeat tags, one that reads your mind and automatically saves your page to deli.cio.us with whatever tags are in your head.

One thing I'll say for deli.cio.us is that its saving and editing functions are remarkably advanced. I've seen other "ajax" applications (basically, pages that let you shift and edit modules without reloading a danged thing), and this is by far the most sophisticated. It's really impressive. As you edit a bookmark, it suggests tags based on your existing tags and whatever other folks have tagged the same page. It's so intelligent that I actually fear it. I'm convinced it could reach through the screen, yank off my shirt, tag it and spit it back at me.

So it's a pretty neat way of saving and organizing bookmarks. And then I can import THAT into Yahoo and do whatever I want with it. And yes, I found it mildly interesting to see how many other people had saved various pages of mine.

Beyond that, I'm not quite convinced. Does anyone really want to see what I've bookmarked? Everytime I see it on someone else's page, I think they're saying to me, "Hey, I took my bookmarks and made ... a page with ... words ... bigger than other words."

If you're interested, take a peek.