Thing 11 - A del.icio.us thing!
Before this thing, I must admit that I have only done minor tagging in my life, and I had never used del.icio.us before. I’ll start with del.icio.us…
As mentioned, I’d never used the del.icio.us service and really knew very little about it other than it was a “social network for bookmarking” (and that its name is hard to type). But I now know that description is lacking it justice. del.icio.us is much more than sharing bookmarks with friends. Primarily, it acts a central, Cloud repository for your bookmarks. And since their are tools to integrate with almost any browser, it does do a nice job at this. From the the social aspect of the site are really more about 1) improving your own understanding of common tags (more on that in just a second) and 2) discovering other websites that may be of interest from others based on your own bookmarks. This last part I find especially fun!
Tagging itself is still an odd thing to me. I understand and appreciate that it is at the heart of the information seeking world we live in today. However, it is subjective and only as accurate as the person doing the tagging. (Ex: Kay Bailey Hutchinson’s campaign website.) But I suppose this has been a problem with cataloging and organization since the days of Alexandria. On that note, I do like that del.icio.us allows you to see how others have been tagging the same link, so that you may see what standard terms others are using with the same subject.
I’m guessing that’s why tagging and del.icio.us were combined for this Thing.
PS: You can follow my bookmarks at del.icio.us/bobzipf, to which I will also create a link at the About Me section on the bottom of this page.
