Week 7

Hello again. Week 7 - del.icio.us, tagging, folksonomies, LibraryThing, and Technorati - a big week! I did the del.icio.us exercise, and happily found it quite straightforward. Set up an account (http://delicious.com/missemerald) and posted 2 bookmarks to it - one to this blog, and another to 'Faith and Theology' (a blog I read regularly). Initially, I didn't understand that to use 2 words or more for one tag you need to combine them without a space (eg nswstatelibrary), but once I got this right I was happy with my tags.

I then explored Technorati and LibraryThing. I was impressed by the advanced search capability on Technorati (keyword, URL, tag), and am now tempted to use LibraryThing to organise my somewhat chaotic home library!

To me, the striking thing about all these tools is their profoundly social nature. Yes, they have other benefits (eg accessing your bookmarks from any computer via del.icio.us), but it seems to me that the overriding advantage they offer is various forms of sharing and collaboration with others (eg is easy to see how libraries can use del.icio.us to assist users in accessing quality sites, and also how different libraries can share their discoveries with each other).