started out play­ing “Just Dance” on the Wii (whoo-hoo!)
Wii is a great place to start
when you’re ready to learn how to use a Wii, send your 12-year old out of the house because they show you too quickly
you can teach your­self to do this (really, you can)

why gam­ing?
– con­nect with patrons who are gamers; they love it when you show an inter­est in some­thing that’s impor­tant to them; it’s good to know about gam­ing regard­less of what type of library you’re in
– pro­mote mul­ti­ple types of lit­er­acy
– increase traf­fic
– it’s fun

applied for ALA’s Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Lit­er­acy grant with the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion
got $5000, $4000 of which was spent on Wiis & DDR for each library in the school dis­trict
had a few logis­ti­cal prob­lems but money from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion was slow in com­ing, which forced some changes
she also loans her equip­ment out to teach­ers
also explor­ing hav­ing kids cre­ate games using Scratch

$1000 for gam­ing at her school — com­put­ers, con­sole, and board games
kids have become the experts and help each other

they do a fam­ily fun night at least once a year
Wendy sets up DDR and Gui­tar Hero + Band Hero
PS2s aren’t as ver­sa­tile as the Wii but can still be good to get you started, espe­cially with DDR
had trou­ble find­ing games that would run on their old com­put­ers
– used Civ­i­liza­tion, a vet game, Star Wars (which is the most pop­u­lar and is her only T game)

gets shy and non-sports kids involved
it’s fun to watch them social­ize and help each other

now we’re play­ing group Back­seat Draw­ing — awesome!

showed some books with game themes
they also read a lot of guides and cheats — they do a ton of read­ing around gaming

men­tioned “Libraries Got Game” by Brian Mayer and Chris Har­ris and their align­ment of board games with AASL’s stan­dards (much love in the room for this)

Wendy was sup­posed to defend the grant to the school board because they weren’t sure they wanted to accept “gam­ing” money, but they had already accepted it by the time she got there

exam­ples of com­puter strat­egy games — Spore (although her older com­put­ers won’t run it), Civilization

showed ALA’s Online Toolkit for librarians

free online games, which often have a cause-related theme (hunger, jus­tice, etc.)
in her dis­trict, any­thing that has “game” in it is auto­mat­i­cally blocked, so she works with them to let cer­tain ones through

Games for Change
Gene­see Valley’s data­base of games let you search by game time and ROI

Daniel Rus­sell, Google Search Qual­ity & User Hap­pi­ness
2010 Alaska Library Asso­ci­a­tion Con­fer­ence, open­ing keynote speaker

Lewis & Clark left with­out a decent map
it’s a com­pli­cated world out there and you don’t want to end up like the Don­ner Party (hey, go that way; it looks good)
what does the cur­rent infor­ma­tion map look like?
let’s be adven­tur­ers but keep our eyes and minds open

did a demo of Google Earth
cost to put the fly­over together = $0 and four min­utes of time
Google will crawl it within 48 hours
when Lewis & Clark pub­lished about their trip, it took 10 years
we see the world dif­fer­ently, and the library isn’t what it used to be
stacks are no longer a core com­pe­tence — the infor­ma­tion land­scape has rad­i­cally changed

1200 exabytes of new con­tent are gen­er­ated each year (1.2 yot­tabytes if that helps or 1.2 bil­lion terrabytes)
3.6 zetabytes per per­son per year (mostly music and video)
libraries don’t have to curate and man­age that — it stream to you
text words per pseron per year = .1% of that total
the good news is that the amount of read­ing per per­son per year has gone up by 3X since 1980 (pri­mar­ily due to inter­net access); hap­pen­ing online, not print
so need to develop new skills and new literacies

showed Google Books
can click on the places in a book and travel to all of them
can actu­ally reca­pit­u­late Huck Finn’s jour­ney down the river

LoC has 10 ter­abytes of text data or .01 petabytes
he has 2 LoCs at home
an exabyte = 50,000 years of DVD or 10 bil­lion copies of The Econ­o­mist (there aren’t enough trees in Alaska to print them all)

we’re sup­port­ing this renais­sance of access to print cul­ture at the same time we’re expand­ing online con­tent
1.5 mil­lion out of copy­right books that can be printed for $8 each

do you care about all of this as long as you can get to the stuff that you care about?
what Google is try­ing to fig­ure out is how can I read your mind from the cou­ple of words you gave me — which pages you want to see of theirs out of all of those exabytes of data?
it’s not just text anymore

men­tioned Hans Rosling’s TED talk about visu­al­iz­ing sta­tis­tics
men­tioned Baby Names Voy­ager
Google bought soft­ware to add visual sta­tis­tics to Google Docs
the cool part is I can type my name and see when my name peaked
is this a book? no. is it a visu­al­iza­tion? yes. but it’s also inter­ac­tive. where/how do I cat­a­log this?
these kinds of inter­ac­tive doc­u­ments allow you to under­stand in ways that were not pos­si­ble before
showed what hap­pened to names that begin with vow­els dur­ing the 40s and 50s — “the val­ley of the vow­els“
the answer to what hap­pened is in the hard con­so­nants
no one knew this until they could see it in this visu­al­iza­tion
our notion of what con­sti­tutes infor­ma­tion and librar­i­an­ship is changing

how do peo­ple search now?
sup­pose you’re Google and you get the query “jaguar” — what do they want?
one of the dif­fer­ences about being Google though is that you’re at a ref­er­ence desk where a bil­lion peo­ple a day ask the question

what about “iraq?” today, it’s the way; 15 years ago, it was prob­a­bly antiq­ui­ties
Google sees queries shift­ing a lot
“lat­est release Thinkpad dri­vers touch­pad” = I know exactly what they want
“ebay” = in the top 10 most pop­u­lar queries in Eng­lish per day
“google” is also in the top 10 queries per day — why?? are they try­ing to cause the recur­sive melt­down of Google’s servers?
there are 20,000 ways to mis-spell “Bri­tany Spears” (and they all want pic­tures of her)

one of the inter­est­ing things they do is use machine-generated algo­rithms
they don’t have to mis-spell a new celebri­ties name 20,000 times — their users will do that for them
that’s how infor­maiton works now

he goes to peo­ples’ homes a lot to talk to them and watch their behav­ior
showed a video clip of some­one search­ing at home for which celebrity has won the most Oscars
(she was pretty con­fused with the results she was get­ting — didn’t real­ize she had moved into the “Google News” sec­tion)
she has a grad­u­ate degree, runs her own web­site, and has her own tv show
the equiv­a­lent of watch­ing some­one look­ing at a text­book in the library and won­der­ing why she’s sud­denly look­ing at the news
this is why he has a job
he sees prob­lems in the world and tries to fix them

weekly sta­tis­tics:
3.9 vis­its per user
9.4 searches per user
11.2 search clicks per user
4 min­utes dura­tion
29% query refine­ment rate
they’re not spend­ing a lot of time in “the stacks”

66% of their users have less than one query per day
aver­age query length is less than 3 words
the “very con­fi­dent” peo­ple in a Pew study search mul­ti­ple times per day (34%)
suc­cess makes them search more often
92% feel con­fi­dent in their search­ing abil­ity
you don’t get good doing any­thing less than once per day (for four min­utes, no less)
55% call them­selves an “expert searcher” (despite how lit­tle I use the system)

they’re happy when they get a result from a search
peo­ple think of exper­tise as being socially-normed
“all of my friends say I’m the best searcher” — you want to say you’re good
peo­ple like to take on tasks they can suc­ceed at
showed an exam­ple where the dif­fer­ence in the ques­tion was “ghost town” vs “aban­doned city“
the “ghost town” peo­ple didn’t do well search­ing and were unhappy — took them a lot longer to find the infor­ma­tion
librar­i­ans are syn­onym pro­fes­sion­als
“func­tional fixed-ness” — being stuck on a search term, not being able to think of a synonym

Google is try­ing to con­vert peo­ple from the “ghost town” group to the “aban­doned city” group
they can see improve­ment over time

but the infor­ma­tion land­scape is so complex

Google launches about 10 prod­ucts per week, although more are invis­i­ble (tweaks to the algo­rithm, etc.)
but so far this year (and it’s only March 5), they’ve launched:
a really long list of things
these are all things that hap­pened to our infor­ma­tion land­scape in the last two months
new kinds of con­tent are com­ing online all the time
3D mod­els in SketchUp
“what’s a fly­ing but­tress? let me show” vs a 2D pic­ture in a Time-Life book

new kinds of query­ing infor­ma­tion
eg, Google Gog­gle — “Google, what’s that?“
“your cell­phone — it’s not just for typ­ing any­more“
“wait — when did cell­phones become stan­dard for typ­ing?“
tak­ing a pic­ture of a book gives you the meta­data about it (same for a bot­tle of wine, etc.)
you don’t have to type as much any­more
the way you inter­act with Google is changing

with Google Earth, if you fly to the Prado in Madrid, you can fly into the build­ing and even into one of the pic­tures; they’ll throw you out of the build­ing if you try that in Spain
get a level of detail you can’t see if you go there

Google Flu Trends
can tell when flu out­breaks are hap­pen­ing around the world by watch­ing for where queries are being made from
showed chart that illus­trates Alaska got it worse than other places and the out­break peaked in Octo­ber
any­one can run queries in Google Trends

how do you find Google Trans­la­tion Ser­vices? it’s not a book on a shelf
“when in doubt, search it out“
they’re work­ing rad­i­cally fast to change our world

Quan­tam ESP exper­i­ment
showed the old “psy­chic rab­bit” trick with play­ing cards
the point is that every­thing changes
you can’t pay atten­tion to every­thing
you’re smart — why didn’t you remem­ber all of the cards? because he told you to focus on one
there’s lots of stuff going on with your per­cep­tion and what you’re pay­ing atten­tion to

what have you noticed? what have you not noticed?
no one notices things like the lit­tle arrow that expands the map or lets you pan around the map and the “more” link
nobody sees these things — he has the logs to prove it
they’re focus­ing on what they’re try­ing to do
“per­cep­tual or change blind­ness“
showed the dif­fer­ence between a Google Map from 5 years ago ver­sus today
nobody noticed the results moved from the right side to the left
they change things all the time and nobody notices

how do we learn? how do we help our patrons learn?
it’s not like they’re ship­ping a new ver­sion of an OS — they’re chang­ing every­thing all the time, every day
and it’s not all nicely curated or indexed
that’s the growth rate we have to be think­ing about

“how do we help our patrons“
of the 4 Rs, the fourth one is really “research“
in order to write com­pre­hen­sively and deeply, you need to do deep research
it’s not just look­ing up a call num­ber — that’s just the begin­ning
this is no longer optional — now the whole cul­ture has to under­stand this, not just librarians

analy­sis from 40 inter­views:
every­body knows what a query is, what a result is
but no one knows what “search on page” and “search in results” mean
it’s not helped by click­bombs like the “mis­er­able fail­ure” search results
if you’re not on the inside with a mech­a­nism to under­stand how this stuff works, you think Google is mon­key­ing with the sys­tem, even though they aren’t; some­one else is
most peo­ple don’t under­stand “clas­sic search engine opti­miza­tion“
makes it impos­si­ble to have a coher­ent men­tal model for how the web works

with­out a detailed model, we’re “cargo cultists” (New Guinea)
when some­one tells you to reboot the router to get wire­less back, you’re a cargo cultist
“never click up there”

“I dunno how it works. I just type words, and answers come back to me… about any­thing… any­thing at all…” — stu­dent
within his realm, he was a good searcher
devel­oped vocab­u­lary and domain knowl­edge around expen­sive watches but can’t find the cap­i­tal of Alaska

when you’re in West­Law, you have to know how to make the oper­a­tors work
in Google, you have to know how to come up with good search terms

6 kinds of knowl­edge & skills needed to search:
– pure engine tech­nique (choos­ing good terms, dou­ble quotes, etc.)
– infor­ma­tion map­ping (reverse dic­tio­nary, con­tents of domains, Wikipedia, etc.)
– domain knowl­edge (med­ical knowl­edge, plumb­ing knowl­edge, etc.)
– search strat­egy (know­ing when to shift strate­gies, move from wide to nar­row, pre­serv­ing state, etc.)
– assess­ment (how do you assess the cred­i­bil­ity of a resource? a lot of this is tied up in domain knowl­edge, which 16-year olds don’t have)
– site-specific knowl­edge (know­ing how a site works, is laid out, etc.)

basic skills:
– Control-F to find
– tabs (how to use effec­tively to orga­nize search)
– key­word query choice (effec­tive choices; low/high fre­quen­cies terms)
– tac­tics (when to focus on par­tic­u­lar resource)
– strate­gies (how long to pur­sue a tac­tic; when to switch; how to dis­cover)
– under­stand­ing what you find (read­ing for under­stand­ing SERPs; not “overreading”)

teach­ing research skills
– want peo­ple to under­stand the world and do research so they under­stand the world
– not just web search skills
– author­ity assess­ment
– crap detec­tion
– stay­ing on task
– dis­cov­ery
– note­tak­ing
– data inte­gra­tion
– rep­re­sen­ta­tion construction

find­ings:
1 — very uneven indi­vid­ual level of search skill (every­one showed at least one “deep” skill; every­one showed at least one mis­taken under­stand­ing; 90% wished they knew how to search bet­ter, but only 10% will take a class)
search behav­ior pat­terns
users don’t know the names of parts or rec­og­nize them (includ­ing URL, site, query; it’s hard to search for things you can’t name; don’t want to click on that because it might bring up porn)

2 — com­fort level is VERY impor­tant
users choose famil­iar over scary
peo­ple tend not to explore things they dn’t know
they worry about find­ing porn
they worry about hav­ing unkonwn things hap­pen when they click on strange links
– edu­ca­tion is acci­den­tal
– peo­ple are not good reporters of their own behav­ior (“I don’t have a tool­bar; I don’t do image search”)

3 — peo­ple don’t know much about Google as a whole (an oppor­tu­nity for librar­i­ans)
they don’t know what’s pos­si­ble
a CTO who didn’t know how to find Google Maps to find a pub in Palo Alto
a PhD cog­ni­tive psy­chol­o­gist didn’t know about Google Scholar
– tar­get site knowl­edge is critical

where do we go next?
– there is a big, big, big need for help — it’s not all intu­itive; they can’t yet do mind-reading
– huge range of men­tal mod­els among users
– users, for the most part, have lit­tle idea what’s pos­si­ble in web search or how to use it effec­tively
they’re learn­ing acci­den­tally from peers or from librar­i­ans
we’re look­ing at an information-illiterate pop­u­la­tion
no one else is show­ing them

- show them the shape of the infor­ma­tion land­scape
– teach your patrons
– make time to con­tin­u­ally edu­cate your­self (you’re now enrolled in a per­ma­nent edu­ca­tion process; if you miss it for a cou­ple of years, good luck catch­ing up)

every­thing is shift­ing and mov­ing faster, so make time for con­tin­ual self-improvement
“be the Lewis, be the Clark” — com­mu­ni­cate this stuff to our patrons
be the core of dis­cov­ery for patrons

I love serendip­ity. While I was prepar­ing for my ACPL Library Camp pre­sen­ta­tion about libraries and civic engage­ment, I saw a post on the Civic Engage­ment blog in which Nancy Kranich pointed to a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle on the topic.

“Pro­mot­ing Cit­i­zen­ship: How Librar­i­ans Helped Get Out the Vote in the 1952 Pres­i­den­tial Elec­tion,” Libraries & the Cul­tural Record 43 no1 1–28 2008 (Unfor­tu­nately, it doesn’t appear to be online in its entirety, but you can get the full text through Gale’s Aca­d­e­mic OneFile.)

I think this fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle pin­points the moment in time when libraries became known for pro­vid­ing high-quality, accu­rate, authen­tic infor­ma­tion about all sides of an issue. Its cer­tainly the point at which libraries became out­lets for infor­ma­tion about vot­ing. In a fas­ci­nat­ing look back, author Jean Preers chron­i­cles the efforts made to civi­cally engage Amer­i­cans and increase voter turnout in the 1948 and 1952 elections.

It starts with an ini­tia­tive by the Amer­i­can Her­itage Foun­da­tion in 1947, which results in the book­let Good Cit­i­zen: The Rights and Duties of an Amer­i­can, a con­fer­ence, and the Free­dom Train, an actual train that trav­eled across the coun­try exhibit­ing “orig­i­nal doc­u­ments that that estab­lished the nation’s demo­c­ra­tic tra­di­tion, from the Bill of Rights to the Eman­ci­pa­tion Procla­ma­tion.” The book­let is a won­der­ful arti­fact — I highly rec­om­mend it as a his­tor­i­cal snap­shot, and thank­fully it’s avail­able on the Inter­net Archive, thanks to the Uni­ver­sity of Florida’s George A. Smath­ers Libraries.

Dur­ing this time, the Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion (dis­claimer: my employer, although I wasn’t even born back then) “under­took its own pro­gram to pro­mote the dis­cus­sion of cur­rent issues in pub­lic libraries. This was a direc­tion long-favored by its Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Carl Milam, and, as part of its “Four Year Goals” in 1948, ALA had ini­ti­ated a pro­gram called Great Issues, which urged librar­i­ans to high­light such top­ics as U.S.-Russian rela­tions, civil rights, and world gov­ern­ment in their col­lec­tions and programs.”

Librar­i­ans started cre­at­ing bib­li­ogra­phies for these top­ics and encour­aged com­mu­nity orga­ni­za­tions to form read­ing and dis­cus­sion groups around them.

“Ruth Ret­zen, chair of ALA’s Adult Edu­ca­tion Board, saw this as an oppor­tu­nity for libraries to take the lead in their com­mu­ni­ties, direct­ing their pro­grams towards wider cir­cu­la­tion of per­ti­nent infor­ma­tion: ‘Let us make our libraries active com­mu­nity cen­ters for the spread of reli­able infor­ma­tion on all sides of this vital issue and for the encour­age­ment of free dis­cus­sion and action.’ ”

Unfor­tu­nately, none of these efforts really suc­ceeded, and voter turnout for the 1948 elec­tion was “sur­pris­ingly low.” To cel­e­brate its 75th anniver­sary in 1951, ALA changed direc­tion and used a $150,000 grant from the Ford Foun­da­tion to help libraries imple­ment read­ing and dis­cus­sion groups them­selves. [Iron­i­cally, “this nation­wide adult edu­ca­tion pro­gram began in the fall of 1951 just as National Library Day obser­vance in Phli­adel­phia on Octo­ber 4 effec­tively con­cluded the seventy-fifth anniver­sary cel­e­bra­tion.” All Philadel­phia libraries are cur­rently set to close on Octo­ber 2, 2009, unless the Penn­syl­va­nia Leg­is­la­ture acts to save them.]

As ALA began to ramp up its pro­gram, the AHF con­tin­ued to work on increas­ing voter turnout for the 1952 elec­tion. The folks behind the AHF pro­gram real­ized that guilt­ing peo­ple into vot­ing wasn’t work­ing (and wasn’t likely to start work­ing any­time soon), so they also changed direc­tion to sim­ply “pro­vide ade­quate infor­ma­tion and mate­ri­als to imple­ment the will of the peo­ple.” An enhanced focus on civic and non­profit orga­ni­za­tions brought ALA and libraries into the effort as the cen­tral source cit­i­zens could go to in order to find unbi­ased infor­ma­tion. ALA agreed, in part because this meant the AHF and other orga­ni­za­tions would pro­mote this new role and encour­age their mem­bers to seek out libraries specif­i­cally for unbi­ased infor­ma­tion that could then be used to reg­is­ter local vot­ers. Accord­ing to Preers, this is also when libraries take on the man­tle of library adult edu­ca­tion, another new role.

It truly is a thought-provoking arti­cle (there’s a lot more to it, so you really should read the whole thing), and it high­lights one of the themes that’s res­onated with me per­son­ally dur­ing the last 12–18 months, that when we talk about how the library “used to be,” we have to be very spe­cific about which era we’re refer­ring to. As I’ve noted in the past about gam­ing, children’s ser­vices are a rel­a­tively recent addi­tion to libraries, as are fic­tion, mul­ti­me­dia, and even pub­lic access (see my brief post about D. W. Krummel’s The Seven Stages of Librar­i­an­ship for more about this).

More impor­tantly, it helps show how proac­tive civic engage­ment is not a new role for 21st cen­tury libraries. We’ve done this before — suc­cess­fully — and we can do it again — suc­cess­fully — if we focus on spe­cific areas. For exam­ple, stud­ies show that gam­ing in libraries could include civic engage­ment expe­ri­ences. I’m also inter­ested in the “Great Issues” pro­gram to offer the library as a por­tal to civic dis­course around many of the “great” issues that aren’t eas­ily acces­si­ble to the aver­age per­son. Pri­vacy, dig­i­tal iden­tity, online rep­u­ta­tion, media lit­era­cies, trans­par­ent gov­ern­ment… there’s a wide range of top­ics that need addressing.

The ques­tion is can librar­i­ans (and not just pub­lic librar­i­ans) still pro­vide this type of ser­vice? I ques­tion if there’s any­one else who can.

One of the points I tried to empha­size in my talk about libraries and civic engage­ment (PDF) at last month’s Allen County Pub­lic Library’s Library Camp is that this isn’t a new role for us. The easy, sound­bite way to explain this is to note that at the turn of the pre­vi­ous cen­tury, one of our major roles was to help immi­grants assim­i­late into Amer­i­can soci­ety and learn how to be U.S. cit­i­zens. At the turn of the cur­rent cen­tury, there’s a sim­i­lar need for us to do the same thing for dig­i­tal immi­grants, in no small part because there really isn’t any­one else to help those folks who are past high school age.

I’ve been grav­i­tat­ing towards this topic lately because I see so much poten­tial, for both libraries and soci­ety, and the fol­low­ing idea makes total sense to me.

From the 2020 Fore­cast: Cre­at­ing the Future of Learn­ing site, New Civic Lit­era­cies:

“David Nord­fors, who runs the inno­va­tion jour­nal­ism pro­gram at Stan­ford, stays stu­dens are mov­ing towards a jour­nal­isatic method of learn­ing — find­ing knowl­edge, ass­esing it, and then con­nect­ing the dots to build a story.”

Sadly, like the 2006 MacArthur report about par­tic­i­pa­tory cul­ture, the 2020 effort includes libraries in that future only as after­thoughts, no more than poten­tial sup­port resources, rather than cen­tral, dri­ving fig­ures. While I applaud efforts like MacArthur’s dig­i­tal learn­ing in edu­ca­tion ini­tia­tive and the 2020 Fore­cast, I remain con­vinced that as a soci­ety, we’ll have a much greater impact on civic life for a greater range of peo­ple by focus­ing on libraries as the pri­mary change agent, not schools.

We’re already well-positioned in our com­mu­ni­ties to be the con­ven­ers for this type of activ­ity, we have a library ecosys­tem for life­long learn­ing that includes adults (not just K-12 stu­dents), we have sup­port­ing resources (not just tech­nol­ogy, but con­text), we teach how to nav­i­gate infor­ma­tion, and we’re the last, safe, non-commercial space that’s open to any­one with­out any bar­ri­ers. In fact, quite a few sec­tions of the 2020 site scream “libraries” to me, and I encour­age you to read through the var­i­ous sections.

So while I’m intrigued by and fully sup­port the idea of schools encour­ag­ing “inno­va­tion jour­nal­ists,” those pro­grams won’t reach their full poten­tial — nor will the stu­dents — with­out libraries to sup­port them. And when those stu­dents get out into the real world, libraries can facil­i­tate their non-school efforts. And we can bring them together with the rest of the com­mu­nity to put those new civic lit­era­cies into prac­tice for everyone.

And don’t get me started on the par­tic­i­pa­tory divide.…

Now that I’m on a smart­phone that has a real web browser and is capa­ble of mul­ti­task­ing (the Palm Pre), In fact, I find myself expect­ing it to act like my lap­top. I’ve stopped car­ry­ing my lap­top or my net­book to work each day because I can do so much on my phone, but I’m still notic­ing where deci­sions made by web design­ers make my mobile life easier.

So here’s mobile devel­oper tip #1, my two cents: use plu­g­ins and wid­gets that let users auto­mat­i­cally share your con­tent on sites like Twit­ter, Deli­cious, Face­book, etc., because you’ll make the user’s life eas­ier. Granted, not all phones sup­port the Javascript that pow­ers this type of ser­vice on a web page, but more and more will, so con­sider get­ting ahead of the curve and adding it now.

The alter­na­tive for me as the reader (acknowl­edg­ing each person’s sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent) is to:

1. Leave the site up in a card until I get home in the evening and can man­u­ally book­mark it on my lap­top. This works about 50% of the time.
2. Email the site to myself so I can book­mark it later on my lap­top. This works about 80% of the time but is annoying.
3. Try remem­ber­ing to revisit the site later on my lap­top to book­mark it. This works 0% of the time.

As a result, I’m find­ing that I’m far more likely to book­mark some­thing if there’s a direct link to post it to Deli­cious, and that work­flow will con­tinue for me until there’s a Pre app that makes this eas­ier, which means I really appre­ci­ate sites that offer this. Even bet­ter is if you can add it so that it appears in your RSS feed so that it shows up in places like Google Reader and Blog­lines, too.