I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal today. Of course, my name isn’t exactly Bowen Delle, but that’s pretty close — and not nearly as bad as some other corruptions I’ve heard.

So, why bother with “tagging”, or a service like del.icio.us? Who, you might ask, has the time to think up and key in a bunch of descriptive keywords for every bookmark. Just bookmark it and… forget it!

Exactly.

I look in on my old IE or more recent Firefox bookmarks very rarely. In fact, there’s only one Firefox bookmark that I use with any regularity (aside from those in my “Bookmarks Toolbar”) — and that’s for the status page of our WiFi router. I don’t use the others because I’ve simply forgotten about them - they’re buried deep in folders, locked on my hard drive, invisible.

Joshua makes a nice point in his interview with Jeremy Wagstaff: “Search is more associated with the recall, whereas tagging is more associated with the storage.” Quite right, because of course an individual doesn’t really have much opportunity to “store” things in general on the internet - after all, your blog (if you have one) is just one of several billion web pages. Search is broad yet shallow, in terms of personal differentiation. Bookmarks, whether on your hard drive on with a service like del.icio.us, are narrow but much deeper, richer, more satisfying on a personal basis. You can’t find anything and everything on the internet in your bookmarks, but you can (hopefully) find those things that you care about most.

So, why use del.icio.us (or one of the others) instead of your browser’s own bookmarks?

1) Central storage: A online bookmarking service is accessible from anywhere you use the internet, not just one PC. This applies to any of the services, including toolbar-based bookmark services like Yahoo and A9. Del.icio.us can be intergrated into Firefox with Foxylicious and various bookmarklets. Someone could also easily build a del.icio.us toolbar.

2) Personal and global view: An online service lets me see not only my own bookmarks, but those of other people. In data-architecture terms, I can pivot on any one of at least three axes: person, URL, and tag. Just for starters, I can see who else has bookmarked the URL that I did, what other URL’s that person has bookmarked, and what other bookmarks have been tagged with the same tag. This is social networking with some real utility. Friendster is fun and all, but once you’ve gotten all your friends to sign up, there’s not much reason to go back unless you’re looking for dates.

3) Integration: Like many other new-school web services, del.icio.us has open API’s, which allows people to build services that talk to and leverage del.icio.us. Contrary to the prehistoric thinking of some developers, your worth is not measured in how much you keep others from knowing — it’s measured in often what you know is used. Check out some of the experiments floating around del.icio.us.

4) Tagging: Although I came upon the idea by way of del.icio.us, tagging can be applied to almost any application, including browser-based bookmarks. The advantage with an online service is that I can pivot on tags not only within my own data, but across other people’s bookmarks and even across other services.

More on this later…

PS - AAPL is up to 73, which means I’m almost to my Mini. Now lookee there — I wonder if Apple chose the name in part for the affinity with the other Mini. In the meantime, I’m reading up on Mac software… Also, they’re not exactly rare any more, but I have plenty of Gmail invites - let me know if you want one.

I’m not sure if the Mac Mini is a stroke of genius on Job’s part, but it is a good idea. The psycological impact of a $499 price point is big — for a Mac voyuer like me, it’s just about enough to get me to finally try Mac again after 10+ years away. Why bother? For one, good design pays — not just the seller, but the buyer/user as well. My time is valuable, and as much of it I spend in front of a computer, the more I enjoy it the better. Secondly, $499 is doable to check out Apple’s great software, as well as great third-party apps like Delicious Library and Quicksilver. I haven’t bought mine yet; I’m waiting for the little block of AAPL that I bought the day of the announcement (@ 66) to climb high enough to cover the cost. Almost there!

I’ve been working feverishly to prepare for the next two AdMonsters events — there’s more work than ever as Europe finally seems to be taking off. I’m heading to Zurich Feb 6, staying a week — and “stopping” in Cadiz (Spain) on the way home to check out some property there. Not that I can afford to buy anything, but it sounds good. With any luck there is some snow close to Zurich for Sunday the 13th - the day before my 35th birthday. Looks like I’ll be spending that day with Valentin in Cadiz — it’s St. Valentine’s, after all.

PS - found this in my inbox from a year or so ago: PARIS ADVERTISING FESTIVAL COLLAPSES IN DISARRAY
Keynote Speaker Pulls Out; Other Speakers Face Empty Rooms. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen to me over there. As least we don’t promise “2,000 delegates” - jeez.

Listen, I’m proud to be from SF, and also to surf Ocean Beach — or at least try. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m basically hopeless at it, but I have to say something about the conditions. Having surfed a couple other places where the waves are actually good (Baja, Santa Cruz), OB flat out sucks most of the time. It is a great place to surf, simply because you’re on a huge exposed Pacific Ocean Beach, and it’s quite dramatic, but that doesn’t have anything to do with how the surf is. I know that it’s possible to get decent rides there, and I do like to surf, and OB is the closest place, etc. but frankly it’s often the case that I just don’t really enjoy myself out there. Maybe I’m just a pu**y, but even a crappy point is better than heaving beachbreak. I’m still going to surf OB — and Pacifica (which is usually even worse) — but I may have to take up windsurfing or something again for better water time.

Picasa 2 sure is neat. The interface is so slick, and it seems to do just about everything the right way. With one big exception — I want to be able to integrate Picasa with WordPress, as I did with iMatch. I want my captions, etc to be preserved, and I want to be able to create a blog entry for each photo, so I can reference them in other posts.

If I ever have time, I’ll have to have a look at the XML output from Picasa; some others are thinking the same thing. The thing about this XML is that I’d have to write some code on the PC to parse the XML, upload the images, and create entries in the WordPress database. Granted, that’s what I did with iMatch, but if one was to do that, it would be nice to have access to Picasa’s database, instead of having to word off of a static export file.