del.icio.us

I've been using del.icio.us for almost two years, ever since I learned about it in the "Social Software in Libraries" course I mentioned in "#8: RSS and Bloglines."

Since I'm often browsing away from home and/or away from my own workstation, it's extremely helpful to be able to quickly bookmark a website or web page in my del.icio.us account.

I don't always use the bookmarks. Often I don't even go back to look at them.

But the great thing is I don't have to remember where I saw such-and-such online. I have my own tag cloud and tag bundles, and these let me browse again later.

Now there's a catch to using deli.cio.us: the default for bookmarks is that they are public, unless you save them as private.

I didn't know this when I started using deli.cio.us, so all of my 120+ bookmarks are public. Though there's nothing I particularly want to hide, I'd rather not have all of them public. I just haven't had the time to go back and edit 120+ bookmarks.

>:-[

So...I'm not going to give out my deli.cio.us username here. Sorry. Maybe after I edit. (I also won't do a Network Badge till I've edited.)

Anyway, I looked at PLCMCL2's Bookmarks, and found this one: Welcome to the Blogging Libraries Wiki. Looks like a handy resource.

A neat Web 2.0 tool!

Footnote: I'm ambivalent about the whole tagging phenomenon, partly because I probably was an "old fashioned librarian" the moment I was born.

I've spend fiftysome years creating and using hierarchical classification methods: both paper and email filing systems, library classification and cataloging, etc. It's how my mind has learned to work.

I'm also used the searching value of "controlled vocabulary."

This means that the newer approach of non-hierarchical tagging sometimes feels too amorphous and slippery to me.

My mental style of managing information is usually by visualizing it in spatial relationships. Until I can imagine such a spatial display, it's hard to wrap my mind around what I'm learning or using. It's still more difficult for me to do this with non-hierarchical systems...even though they, too, can be displayed visually (witness the tag clouds).

On the other hand, to me the real potential in tagging appoaches is that we get to see how "real people," not only professional catalogers, sort and label things in order to find them again.

That's the key: findability (check out this blog by Peter Morville).

A very interesting new challenge for all of us.