Thing 13: Social bookmarking with del.icio.us.

I've been playing around with del.icio.us a bit. I use it mainly to keep track of bookmarks on different computers, for things I read on a regular basis. I can definitely see the potential of this tool for research assistance by allowing you to combine specific tags to keep track of new content. The key feature of social bookmarking is not just the easy sharing of bookmarks with different users or different computers; it's the network-aspect of it, where you can join a trusted community of people with similar interests and get relevant sites suggested to you by that community.

It just takes a bit of time, though, to add all of these tags. And of course the more tags you can add the more meaningful your actual experience using this service. I think it also helps to bundle up tags into groups for some form of hierarchical structure. You can even organize these links even using the DDC as a framework, as with the example of San Mateo Public Library's del.icio.us page. Librarians are also more used to the concept of using a controlled vocabulary because that's what works for our catalogs. Perhaps with more librarians using tags, tags can become more hierarchical, and standardized.

One thing about all of these 2.0 things is that they slow down pages quite a bit! Please be patient as my tags display; the tags still need a lot of edits and additions but here is the cloud: