Social bookmarking

I was already somewhat familiar with social bookmarking before this week’s assignment, though I haven’t done much more than save a few sites to del.icio.us. The first assignment was useful, since I have never used such sites to research a topic or look for interesting links.

First I searched ‘writing’, which was way too broad; then I narrowed it down to ‘writing inspiration.’ That gave me some useful links. Interestingly, I quickly closed any personal-storied blog posts as uninteresting, and kept open the links to quick-n-dirty lists of tips. These I’ll come back and read later: Do you recognize these 10 mental blocks to creative thinking?; How to be creative; 31 ways to find inspiration for your writing; 20 ways to keep your writing inspiration and creativity high.

I also did a google search. Again, ‘writing’ was too broad (though at least in del.icio.us they were all about creative writing; in google, it was anything that had the word ‘writing’ in its name). ‘Writing inspiration’ got a better result (including two of the pages from del.icio.us), but overall it was definitely hit-and-miss. I only found one new result that look interesting in the first page of Google results: Inspiration – not motivation – for writing.

Overall, del.icio.us delivered a higher number of relevant results, and each was fairly substantial even if the information wasn’t always presented in my preferred style. In Google, fewer links were relevant and even some that looked relevant proved to be threadbare in content once I clicked on the site. I will definitely have to check out del.icio.us again as a search tool. All the clicking could become addicting though…