[Web4lib] del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites -- WHY DO IT?

[Elizabeth Thomsen]

> Del.icio.us tags and bookmarking sites are not yet reflected in any
> search engines that I know of. Until they are, how will they improve
> peoples ability to find information? I looked at del.icio.us and find it
> of no real value to me. If it is of potential value to me and to our
> students and faculty at Morrisville College, please tell me how in plain
> language. 

Social bookmarking, tagging, etc., are of most value right now to people 
within a community, and sites like Furl, Flickr, etc., really do support a 
community of users, or, more accurately, many different, overlapping 
communities of users.  

I use Furl as my social bookmarking site, and love it.  It gives me a 
central place to store my bookmarks, an easy way to sort and share them, 
stored copies of those pages on the Furl site (licensed or otherwise) as 
they existed on the day I saved them, and an easy way to share them with 
people I know, groups, etc.  The stored copies are only available to me 
personally, when I am logged in, the public just gets the links.  So if I 
want to refer you to articles I find helpful, I can send you to this URL:
http://www.furl.net/members/ethomsen
and suggest that you look in my Folksonomy folder.

I joined Furl for my own convenience, not for the social aspect, but as 
soon as I started bookmarking things of interest to me, I started getting 
recommendations, "people who saved this, also saved that."  Great stuff!  
Google uses page ranking based on website linking, but Furl is based on 
what individual pages people thought were useful enough to save, which is 
quite different.  So now I'm finding myself really using those 
recommendations to discover great resources.

As for the tagging, as others have noted, with sites like Flickr, tagging 
is the only way to bring like images together.  The lack of controlled 
vocabulary can be a problem, but tends to self-correct.  For example, on 
Flickr, if you search for the tag manholecover, you'll get all the photos 
tagged that way, plus links to related tags like manhole.  People tag 
partly based on tags other people have used, and the less common tags tend 
to fade out.  And groups will often decide to use a particular tag for a 
special project or game or event.  It's somewhere between natural language 
and taxonomy.

-- 
Elizabeth Thomsen, Member Services Manager
NOBLE: North of Boston Library Exchange
Danvers MA 01923
et at noblenet.org