Tag! You're It! Lucky Lesson #13 on del.icio.us

I've loved and lost many a list of websites because I moved computers or because some IT person re-imaged my PC without giving me a chance to snag my Favorites. In some cases, this was a good thing. My new lists were now made up of the sites I could readily remember and those I used frequently. Starting out fresh also got rid of defunct sites. At work my focus narrowed from collecting sites that helped me answer frequently asked questions & Reader's Advisory sites to collecting specific ILL-related sites that helped me and my staff do our work.

I kinda like del.icio.us. I was first introduced to del.icio.us at an ILL conference. The speaker included it in a super-sonic speedy overview of Web 2.0 tools that she couldn't live without. As my eyes recovered from glazing over, I really didn't couldn't see how I was going to use this knowledge and I relegated the information to my internal "Things I'll Get Around to Looking at When I Have the Time" file. The big drawback I have with del.icio.us is that it's a bit clunky to use- when compared to the coupla clicks efficiency of putting a site in Favorites or in Links. I'm not that crazy about the tagging. Possibly, that's because I don't have a handle on that part yet. I'd rather categorize the sites in general categories of use. The overlapping nature of some of the tags puts some sites in the "wrong" bundle. It's a lot like cataloging sites -as opposed to categorizing them the way you can in Favorites by organizing them by a file name.

Back to the Exercise:
Explore the site options and try clicking on a bookmark that has also been bookmarked by a lot of other users. Can you see the comments they added about this bookmark or the tags that they used to categorize this reference?
I looked at a blog called: LibraryTechtonics: Tagging on Flickr & del.icio.us. It was saved by 77 other people. The comments are brief- most of them talk about the blog though I've noticed a comment that was more about the tagger than about the blog post. Many of used used the same tags for this article.
What del.icio.us doesn't do is this: it doesn't cull out the dead sites. I skimmed and sampled what I was most interested in on the PLCMC del.icio.us site. During a brief viewing, I found 2 dead sites.

Create a blog post about your experience and thoughts about this tool. This is it.
Can you see the potential of this tool for research assistance? Definitely. If -say- the JPL Fiction Department had a del.icio.us site with helpful Reader's Advisory. Or Popular could have a del.icio.us site with music, film, TV, etc. sites. It could be set up so that staff throughout the system could contribute sites that helped them answer customers' questions. You could tap the expertise of all the staff to help answer customers' questions. Or just as an easy way to create bookmarks that can be accessed from anywhere? It is that too. I discussed that more earlier in this post.

I have a del.icio.us badge on this blogspot.

Learning 2.0 Withdrawal Symptoms Hit

This is the second morning in a row that I haven't been able to get this week's lessons. I wonder what's going on. I took a look at the PLCM Learning 2.0 site to see what we would have been looking at and found some dead links. If anyone has done the same thing, click here to find the article: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users.