Topical guides and social bookmarking
18 January 2006 00:06

I've often thought about creating my own scripture study application that would allow me to assign any topic (keyword, category, tag) to any general conference talk, or to any scripture reference. In that sense I could then build my own personal topical guide to the scriptures and to the words of the servants of God.

At work earlier today I started using del.icio.us to tag some interesting Perl Modules that I had found and wanted to remember. So I created some tags that I will start adding to the CPAN pages for all these modules I'm finding. Then I can simply go to del.icio.us/orbital_mechanic/perl_module and see a list of all the Perl Modules I want to remember.

What does del.icio.us have to do with building a topical guide to scriptures and talks? Well, tonight while reading through a talk, and being distracted for a moment to look something up on del.icio.us, my little brain that loves to form associations connected the two. I can use del.icio.us to build my topical guide! I can start tagging the urls of pages that contain conference talks, BYU speeches and references from scriptures.lds.org. Then to search my topical guide, I just do a del.icio.us lookup on the tag/topic in question. I love being able to tie things together in easy ways like this!

The only problem I see at this point is that del.icio.us only lets me use one word tags (space-delimited parsing), but I can think of several topics for which I'd want to use two words, such as "self reliance." Are there other social bookmarking sites out there that allow multi-word tags?