| EXACTLY! Back in the days when "small pieces loosely joined" was a thing, I thought Delicious was very, very cool. (I use Diigo (free) now which is the closest I could find to Delicious when it went bad). I needed something that isn't account dependent and works on web and mobile, so matter where I am browsing content I can save a reference to it. Hypothesis looks interesting but imo is more geared to textual annotation than tagging. Bookmarks are so bad, that they don't even keep your most recent bookmark in a folder at the top. But what we lost when we lost Delicious was so much potential. For example... * people were exploring using tag clouds semanticly, to sort of translate how two different people categorised things (you say "cool", they say "hot" etc) * I think NASA did collaborative tagging where you merely tag interesting things to keep an eye on with nextYear, fiveYears or TenYears then produced a Horizon Report of the overlaps. * People were making news readers that found interesting items based on your tag cloud and items adjacent to those tagged in your cloud. * A tag cloud was a quick "Contents page" for any blog out there... You could glance at one and see if this content was for you. * They were emergent, as in, they evolved over time - so much better than most peoples' idea of categories, or how categories are used in the real world. I think that despite all the potential in bookmarking/tagging people weren't ready to pay for it - and if you're the kind of person who squirrels lots of things away for later, in a sensible manner, you're going to find a way to do it somehow. But bookmarks/tags etc could be so much more. |
Pinboard used to allow browsing public bookmarks without account. If you have one (not me) maybe you still can go to any tag [0] or user and explore tag clouds / adjacency.
Are.na [1] allows a similar kind of networked exploration of links (more general collections than tags though). It is really a (self-described) rabbit hole (but without tag clouds)
Zotero [2] does have a tag cloud (local and web). IMO their online groups are underrated for bookmarks/references collaboration/publication . . I love its UI ! It works on mobile too (browser or custom apps)
So alternatives do exist, but the scale and innovation are not there. I hope someday we will go back to an enhanced form of popular tagging, maybe using Semantics (to associate), AI (to generate) and open decentralized protocols (to standardize)
[0] Exple: https://pinboard.in/t:bookmarking
[1] Exple Collection : https://www.are.na/emily-degrandpre/collaborative-knowledge-...
[2] Random public group : https://www.zotero.org/groups/25016/digital_humanities_educa...