Marketing Nirvana

Gone are the days when bookmarking came to signify one company – del.icio.us, now a property of Yahoo! The site  along with Wikipedia signaled the emergence of sites that tapped into the Wisdom of the Crowds. However, I noticed that I’ve stopped using delicious a while back. And, so I asked my twitter audience who among them used Delicious these days.

Here’s a sampling:

Mike Sansone/Iowa (Twitter id)

I don’t use delicious as much since the redisign (tho that’s not why), I’m finding I can easily bookmark on GoogRdr & FrndFd

Aurelio Montemayor/ Texas (Twitter id)

yes…our editor just held a second session on D. It’s helped me organize my favs and also accesses other’s favs

Damon Garrett/ South Korea  (Twitter id)

Inertia ties me to Delicious. Probably other ways to sync + tag b/marks, but it works. Not sure of the true social benefits.

Scott Drummond/Australia (Twitter id)

why not?I find delicious handy for tagging stuff I want to read later and for sharing stuff with certain firneds only.

My bookmarking strategy and what may have killed delicious?

First off, I notice a certain ambivalence about bookmarking sites in general from the above responses and my bookmarking strategy may offer some answers.

There are two kinds of bookmarks in everyone’s life:

1. Personal bookmarks (Home/Work)

Private bookmarks that I don’t want shared across the world. A Firefox extension called Foxmarks does a decent job of syncing my personal bookmarks between work and home – even going so far as creating a separate profile for each. Hopefully, in the future, Mozilla will get their act together with Weave, achieving something similar.

On a larger scale, I think the ability to share articles I read both on Facebook (via Posted Items) and LinkedIn (via News) enables me to broadcast my bookmarks among a larger yet still private social network of mine.

2. Public/Shared bookmarks

Google Reader, which I’m addicted to, makes it super easy to share articles I read (both inside and outside of Reader). Plus, everything shared/bookmarked is searchable and publicly visible on a Shared Bookmarks page.

Here’s where it gets better. Using a cool service called Twitterfeed, I can then populate my Twitter feed with the articles I share on Google Reader! Facebook too, allows me to import my Google Reader page. So, more than 2000 of my followers get to read what’s on my mind via my bookmarks.

Bottomline: As Damon mentions above, not many people are aware of the social benefits of delicious anymore. This, combined with the emergence of effective alternatives (search and social networking sites) may have doomed delicious.

But, hey, that’s just my take. What in your opinion killed delicious? Or, do you think, they’re alive and kicking. Drop in your $0.02 in the comments section below.

Filed under: Curation

I was planning a post on podcasting (…again) but instead decided to make this a brief post on the http://del.icio.us/ event that was organized yesterday by proud parent Yahoo! at their headquarters in Sunnyvale.

(From l – r: Me, Nicole, Jeremiah, Chris, Kim)

I crept in towards the close (Thanks, Jeremiah, for the reminder) but I was glad I did since I got another opportunity to meet a bunch of cool bloggers. Here’s the “who’s whom” I met:

1. Dave McClure – The Master of 500 hats himself: It’s always great chatting with Dave. Currently he is building buzz around a new startup he’s focused on – oDesk. They have a very interesting premise to their business and one that truly proves that the world is indeed flat. Check out more on oDesk here.

Co-incidentally, oDesk will host the next version of Lunch 2.0, which will be a sequel to the hugely successful Hitachi version.

2. Kim: Couple of interesting facts about Kim. (1) Kim’s been blogging for 6 years (ya, you heard me right). and (2) Kim is also well known in the Bay Area for organizing art/geek events such as “Blogger Idol 2.0” where bloggers get to sing/dance their way to stardom. Well, I dont know if I got that right? However, I look forward to the next Blogger Idol event!

3. Nicole Simon: It was great meeting Nicole, author of three different weblogs and creator of a podcasting channel! Had an interesting conversation on the future of podcasting, videocasting and the death of television!

Feel free to check out Nicole’s many blog avatars here (personal), here (web 2.0) and here (podcast).

4. Greg Galant: Had a brief conversation with Gregory Galant, CEO of Radio Tail (blog), whose recent iMedia article I had discussed in this earlier post of mine.

…also had a chance to just say “Hi” to Chris Heuer, Kay Luo, Jeff Schwartz … I look forward to chatting more with them at future events.

Well, I did want to talk a little bit about this cool new data aggregator – netvibes that I started using recently, but I guess it’d take an entire post to describe what a great tool for marketers it is (think lead generation 2.0). So, stay tuned.

Filed under: Curation