Keep track of your bookmarks and your friends' bookmarks, and their friends' bookmarks (etc)

Jargon warning: there’s no need to be a specialist for what follows, but it does assume knowledge of the inner workings of the web. If it’s incomprehensible, ask a friendly geek to guide you 🙂

I’ve written a couple of quick tips about Google Reader before, suggesting that it is a powerful tool to follow multiple RSS feeds and to make fast slideshows.

Delicious is a bookmarking tool I’ve used for many years to aggregate and share local content into a tag cloud, a sort of rough map of the local web. As well as my own links, I use delicious to follow the links of other people who I trust, giving myself a better chance of not missing anything useful.

However, in the last few months a lot of people were moving over to other bookmark providers because Yahoo threatened to close delicious down. For example, Dave Briggs and Mike Rawlins moved to Pinboard and Andrew Beekan went for Diigo. All work in similar ways. If you really want to get into the pros and cons of bookmarking services, this crowdsourced Google spreadsheet has it all.

Now that they’ve sold it, I can stick with Delicious to see what happens, but I realised that as a lot of people were moving to other tools, my nice neat network page was going to become fragmented.

Avoiding visiting too many websites is the goal of all of this tedious stuff, so I created a folder to merge all the bookmarks in Google Reader. Now all I need to do is paste the URLs of all the people and networks that I want to follow and Google reader will find the RSS feeds and put them all together for me.

Google Reader allows you to create public folders (see settings), so if you want to see all that I just aggregated, visit this page, and if you want to see it in Google Reader, open an account if you haven’t already got one and then copy and paste that same URL into ‘Add a subscription’.