There’s so much to read and so much to learn on the inkernets. Of course there’s also plenty of crap to make you dumber. I see social bookmarking as a way to let other people filter the weeb for you. There’s a bunch of social bookmarking applications out there but I prefer Del.icio.us.
It’s quite fascinating because if you’re interested in "do it yourself" stuff then you can just subscribe to the DIY tag:
http://del.icio.us/tag/diy
Or you can subscribe to the rss feed:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/diy
Now anytime somebody tags a link with DIY you’ll be able to check it out. For example, when I fired up my feedreader this morning I learned how to make fire from a candy bar and a pop can. Given my interest in weird little hacks like this I found it to be quite interesting. That’s just one weakass example. With delicious you can subscribe to any number tags like fashion, gadgets, nerds, football, poetry, insomnia, or whatever floats your boat. Chances are there is some obsessed nerd who is far more interested in the subject matter than you are.
Once you’ve figured out tags, in delicious you can start combining tags as well. Interested in blogs? What about cool blogs?
http://del.icio.us/tag/cool+blog
Cool design?
http://del.icio.us/tag/cool+design
You get the idea.
What if you don’t want to subscribe to a certain subject but rather you’d like to subscribe to someone else’s judgment? I trust that pretty much anything my brother puts into his feed will be interesting to me. Just as I trust his judgment on picks for music and movies I trust his taste in links. It’s like a micro recommendation engine. For example, Matt Haughey is a super tech nerd and he’s brilliant, so I’ll subscribe to his feed because he’ll find interesting things for me to read. Other intersting feeds are Clay Shirky, Jon Udell, Make Magazine etc…