Week 8, Thing 14: tagging & Del.icio.us

14. Learn about tagging and discover Del.icio.us (a social bookmarking site).

OK, first of all, I just now realized, after having looked at it and clicked on it many times, that the title of this on the main assignment page said "social bookmaking" -- I wonder if Mara has some numbers racket going on that she hasn't told us about!

On to the actual assignment: I watched the Common Craft video and then the 8-minute tutorial, although I have to admit, I didn't really absorb everything in the tutorial. Some of it I felt would make more sense to me after I had actually tried using Del.icio.us for a while. It's hard to understand how some of the features and functions will apply to your own use if you haven't even tried the basics yet. Same thing with reading some of the articles. They will probably be more helpful to me after I have dabbled a bit. So I went ahead and set up an account, then added some of my personal bookmarks. I added the buttons for my browser, which really do make adding bookmarks a lot easier.

I did as suggested and tried checking out some of the tags other people have used for a topic I'm interested in. Based on how others had tagged the same sites I did, I ended up editing my list of tags for some sites, adding new ones and even including a singular form in addition to a plural form of the tag, or vice versa. (This can help you to see more things others have tagged, since there is no convention for singular/plural forms in a folksonomy.) Then I tried the same search in Google and came up with lots more hits but not really any more useful sites on the topic. Of course, I also picked a fairly narrow topic that's probably not of interest to as wide an audience as some,which helped limit the results to something somewhat manageable!

I can see how libraries, particularly school libraries, could use social bookmarking sites for research assistance, with teachers and/or librarians creating lists of sources to get students started on a project. And as a person who uses multiple computers, it makes sense to create bookmarks that can be accessed from any of them. I decided it would probably make even more sense for me to have 2 separate Del.icio.us accounts: one for personal stuff, another for strictly school-related things. Then I won't have to keep track of which tags would pull up things colleagues would want to see and which ones might bring up links that would be fairly useless in a school setting.

I may decide later to check out Furl, as suggested by Heather in her comment, but I found that I couldn't get much of a look at it without registering first and just wasn't ready to commit to that yet!