Ok, so for whatever reason, this topic has taken me a while to get my head around. So much of what I’ve learned on this course has involved an application I have at least been familiar with. Even though I’d never used them before, I still knew what to expect with Facebook and Twitter. Social Bookmarking and Tagging – not so much! I was first introduced to Delicious a few years ago in its previous incarnation as del.icio.us, when the principal advantage offered was the option to save website bookmarks beyond your PC. It hadn’t yet evolved to the creation of stacks or sharing links to the extent it has now.
I decided to browse around existing stacks before attempting my own. One user posts a weekly stack of sites related to the advertising industry (http://www.delicious.com/stacks/weeklyfinds), effectively creating something with the look and substance of an online magazine. Browsing through his previous stacks, the links are visually eye-catching, offer a preview of the content, and have been chosen for a particular theme. I can already imagine how useful tagging would be if I began to use Delicious in earnest – so often I’ve had to trawl through my browser history to find a resource I just couldn’t remember how I found originally. Alternatively, I’ve often emailed URLs to myself as the only way to recall a link, so the option to create a Delicious button on the Firefox toolbar would be particularly useful for me. Just as I created my first stack, however, I discovered plans to remove the stack facility in the coming months! As ever, this is a technology that I’ll have to keep up with.
In terms of using tagging and social bookmarking for libraries, Delicious allows a far more dynamic and user led experience, offering tag clouds to help mine for the most useful information and instantly gain an idea of hot topics and the full range of subjects available, rather than from a dry list of alphabetical links that have to be searched systematically. Although one of the downsides of social bookmarking is the unstructured way in which resources are tagged, or that resources may be obscure or inappropriate, it would seem that libraries would be best placed to make the most of social bookmarking, given that they can apply proper classification and selection techniques in order to make available resources tailored to their users with effective tagging. This is still new to me, though, so it’s something I’ll continue to investigate.
Lastly, I gave Wordle.net a whirl. I love any excuse to be remotely artistic, particularly when it gives me the chance to spruce up blog posts with something visually interesting. And that’s where I think Wordle’s value lies – there’s no use in having fantastic content if the user isn’t first drawn to a site, article or blog post. This is an easy tool to create content that’s eye-catching and thematic. Well, that’s if I can manage to upload the Wordle image successfully…
Leigh 2.0 