When it comes to web accessibility and web-standards references, such as the W3C Recommendations for example, i have to be among the most neurotic pack rats. Any time i find a web site which could be a design or development reference to lead me in the ‘right’ direction in terms of accessibility, or web standards and cross-platform compatibility, sometimes even the most remote stretch to be defined as one such web site, I at least bookmark it in Firefox. As a rule, however, most often i’ve been bookmarking everything in my Yahoo! MyWeb shared bookmarks account (available to any Y! Id holder, and quite a nice service). The most useful feature of the Y! MyWeb service is the tag-based and searchable nature of this type of resource– not that it’s a novel idea (the popular website http://del.icio.us , pronounced as “delicious”, a nifty way of being different in avoiding the “dot com” naming system, was probably the first such service to gain popularity), but the Yahoo MyWeb 2.0 is in my opinion the superior version of the concept (although the del.icio.us “tag bundles” column will fit in a browser sidebar, albeit a bit squashed).
For a long time, i was using both of the aforementioned, hosted Social / On-Line Bookmarking services in an effort to determine which was “better”. I had settled that it was del.icio.us– because of the tag bundles, no comma delimiters needed, and of course my sidebar discovery. Admittedly, the tag bundle feature scores a lot of points (hmm… maybe i should make a chart?), but lately i’ve been experimenting with syndicated content and there’s two things that the Y! service offers which del.icio.us does not. The feed from the bookmarks of a Yahoo! My Web account will scroll in RSS Tickers, whereas del.icio.us does not scroll (any aggregator i’ve placed my del.icio.us feed into had no activity– however, the main site is active, which may indicate that only “fresh” bookmarks are sent to the feed). Another feature of Y! that i like, if you look on this very web site, you’ll see under “Social Bookmarks” the MyWeb bookmarks from my account. There are a few different configurations available for this “Y! MyWeb badge”, including a “tag cloud” output.
So, I guess it really comes down to what you like. But since I’ve been using the Y! service exclusively, i realize that i now rely upon it. it’s nice to know that all of that research will be collected and easily searchable for as long as i hold the account (which of course, would be the same with del.icio.us)
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