Eating dog food I preach

There's a fairly large disconnect between what I personally use and what my industry has highlighted as holy-grail great. So I finally got around to creating a del.icio.us account, and managed to find the time to add it to my blog. (I found a great resource for a list of online-del.icio.us tools here)

While I'm not convinced I need the social-networking aspect, an online bookmark solution makes sense for a few reasons:

Too many browsers. I use FireFox for my day-to-day, but occasionally I'll encounter some weird bugginess in FireFox 2.0 so I'll boot up IE 7. What's interesting about switching back and forth between browsers is that once you get settled into a session with a half-dozen tabs open, you don't want to switch back during that session. I also find that I don't bookmark most pages, I use the Browser History sidebar (CTRL+H) to relocate helpful sites. An online solution makes a lot more sense; I just have to bookmark more frequently.

Obsessive Compulsion Disorder and Format C Colon Slash Syndrome. If I kept an organized list of links from the time that I started out online it would be several reams thick. Unfortunately, I never keep a list of bookmarks for too long because I start to suspect my windows machines with performance and garbage in the registry after the install is over a year old. (I start to get anxi around the six-month mark...) I tend to give into this paranoia and format my drives somewhat frequently and in doing so I always forget to backup my bookmarks.

Blog-worthy, maybe. I started my blog to capture thoughts and findings on the web, but some days, posting a blog entry is a challenge. While I do use my blog to capture URLs for reference, not all URLs are blog worthy.

...and heck, if a colleague wanted to find a URL that I found useful, I could point them to my del.icio.us account. So, maybe I do want the social aspect after all. Hmm.

Well, let's see how this experiment plays out -- I've added the delicious tag cloud to my blog on the right. If it's not there in a few months, maybe I stopped using it.