Man, the web is a weird wild place these days. I still remember when Gopher was the hypertext king, when Mosaic first came out, and when the original browser wars started, but even the more recent days when I first discovered Slashdot and when I first started blogging are now ancient history.

up until today, I had been using bloxsom 2.0 [my blog running blosxom], which is almost 3 years old, which is a long time on the web. I feel like moving to Wordpress is an attempt to catch up with modernity a little.

The other thing that I’ve started using is del.icio.us, which is (as I attempt to use the proper buzzwords) a social bookmarking system employing folksonomies. While I am for the most part a socialist democrat in my political leanings, I do have a libertarian streak, and the idea of voluntarily leaving a browser trail kind of gave me the creeps, but, what the hell, given my particular profession, I’m pretty much completely exposed to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and Mr. Alberto “I like torturing people” Gonzales, to name a few, what’s a few more scraps of evidence? (In any case, since this is the government that in five years, for some reason, has failed to find public enemy #1—Osama bin Laden—I’ve got to say, I’m not at all impressed. Sure, they could send some jackbooted thugs to my door right now to scare the crap out of me, and they’ll probably succeed, but other than that, they really haven’t got anything on me. But, as usual, I digress.)

I’ve always had problems keeping my bookmarks straight. I’ve also always wanted to publish my bookmarks on the web. All of this seemed to require writing inordinate amounts of code, not to mention having to learn yet another programming language, even if I used someone else’s GPLed code as a starting point. My bookmark bar has at one point consumed eight lines, which was approximately a quarter of my screen.

With del.icio.us, I feel much more carefree about tagging things. So what if I never plan to visit the site again? I think it takes fewer steps for me to post on del.icio.us than for me to add a bookmark to my browser, and I don’t ever have to worry about deleting it to make space on my bookmark bar.

The other beautiful thing is that there’s no need to worry about synchronizing my bookmarks. Especially since I have both a desktop and a laptop, and since I frequently browse the Internet from remote locations on—horrors—Windows boxes.

In any case, some people opine that del.icio.us is the end all/be all and everyone else should just quit and go home, which doesn’t seem well-based in how things usually work. I mean, did Microsoft quit and go home when Netscape had 80% of the market share?

Besides, I think he misses the point with things like Scuttle and SlashLinks which, while they are conceptually so similar to del.icio.us as to be almost identical, they are open source projects (Scuttle is GPLed, SlashLinks is released under the Creative Commons License) that allow you to host your bookmarks on your own server.

Now why in the hell would you do that? Probably the same reason why you would run Wordpress on your own server instead of using Blogger and Blogspot.

Anyway, whatever happened to the idea that diversity is the keystone to humanity’s success?