Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Item 13: Tagging & Folksonomies - del.icio.us

In this unit we’ll be looking more closely at web 2.0 applications that take serious advantage of tagging (we've already looked at one - Flickr). Tagging is an open and informal method of categorizing that allows users to associate keywords with online content (webpages, pictures & posts). Unlike library subject cataloging, which follows a strict set of guidelines (i.e.Library of Congress subject headings), tagging is completely unstructured and freeform, allowing users to create connections between data anyway they want.

The specific focus of today's lesson is del.icio.us, a social bookmarking manager site that lets you save bookmarks to a central location (no more copying them to multiple browsers on multiple computers) and classify them all with tags.

Many users find that the real power of del.icio.us is in the social network aspect, which allows you to see how other users have tagged similar links and also discover other websites that may be of interest to you. You can think of it as peering into other users’ filing cabinet, but with this powerful bookmarking tool each user's filing cabinet helps to build an expansive knowledge network.

del.icio.us even offers RSS feeds - you can create a shared bookmark site and receive news every time a new link is added.

Some resources on social bookmarking/del.icio.us:

Activities:
  • Watch the Social Bookmarking in Plain English video
  • View one of the del.icio.us tutorials
  • Take a look around del.icio.us using the isdesk account.
  • Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users (click on the text that reads 'saved by # other people'). Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?
  • Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about using this tool. Possible topics: Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Or just an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not sure the last link under the resources on social bookmarking/del.icio.us is working, the "Several Habits of wildly successful del.icio.us users". When I clicked on it the page said "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria."

FVRL Discover 2.0 said...

I've removed the link to the now dead "Several Habits" post. thanks!