del.icio.us vs. ma.gnolia

Next to the obvious difference in appearance (ma.gnolia has a much "cleaner" look than del.icio.us) and some other features (ma.gnolia allows users to rate bookmarked sites and saves/displays a copy of each bookmarked webpage), I feel that the most pertinent difference between the two sites lies in their number of users. Delicious appears to have a substantially greater following in the social bookmarking arena. (Using my own bookmarks in the two sites as an example, 954 other people bookmarked the poetry site I marked in Delicious, while only 15 others did in Magnolia. 169 people marked the Scrabble site I marked in Delicious, while I was the ONLY one to do so in Magnolia.) This makes me feel that Delicious would be a better site to use for social bookmarking (no matter what it looks like and despite any other bells and whistles it may lack) because the power of social bookmarking in organizing the Web and allowing users to find sites of interest and relevance lies in its users. This really is an arena where there is "power in numbers".

Shelfari review

Setting up an account on Shelfari this past week was the first time I have ever used a social bookmarking "book" site. While the concept has always sounded intriguing to me, the idea of inputting all the books I own or have ever read always seemed a bit too overwhelming a task to undertake. I also never really understood the reasons (before this week, that is!) why people needed to advertise to the online world what books they were reading. But this week's assignment forced me to bite the bullet and jump on the book-bookmarking-bandwagon. I chose Shelfari because I hadn't heard people raving about it as much as I had in the past with goodreads and libraryThing: http://www.shelfari.com/o1518075727/shelf

I can see how people get addicted to this type of thing. Shelfari makes it very easy to add books to your "shelf" and displays them in a very visually pleasing manner (one even has the option to change the stain of the shelf's "wood".) Books can also be viewed in a "list view" as well. Your shelfari shelf is divided into three sections: "Books I've read," "Books I'm reading" and "Books I plan to read". I can see how this "plan to read" section might especially serve as a helpful reminder whenever one hears of a good book he or she would like to read in the future. Books read can be tagged and rated (and marked as favorites, owned or "wish list" titles.) People using shelfari can add friends and set up different "groups". A nice thing about the group option is that they can be private (which could allow the group to, more or less, discuss books together as they might in a book group.) All users can read (and write) book reviews in the public domain, and "shelves" can be displayed in one's blog or website. Like most other social bookmarking sites, reading users' reviews and searching for books by tags is a great way for people to find book recommendations.

While I found shelfari to be a very visually pleasing site, I also felt that the book information windows that pop-up whenever one rolls over a book's image were rather annoying (albeit necessary to the site's purpose.) If I were to continue using shelfari in the future, I'm sure I'd eventually end up abandoning the pretty "shelf" view of the books and opt to use the more efficient "list" view in order to avoid all the pop-ups. I also would love to spend more time reading the author features and clicking through the most popular books links when I have more time to spend. To me, shelfari seems to be more of a place for readers to have fun tagging, finding and reading about books online, than as a necessary tool for organizing one's personal library.