Tagging, delicios, Library thing

Lots of reading for this week-tagging, folksonomies, delicious and Library Thing. I spent a lot of time looking at the sites.

I found Technorati hard to read and am not interested in the sex life of some celebrity...

Library thing was also hard to read at first, but I could see it would be useful for applications such as book reviews/ recommendations. Perhaps if a patron asks for a book that is not held in the library we could still help them by offering something similar. I looked at the Kingston Library catalogue, I had to do a few searches before finding something with tags.

On del.icio.us I liked the example of the National Library's Ask now program and can see that keeping a list of reliable sites would be good for the Reference desk and also remote users could use it as a way of accessing reliable information. Better than typing in keywords in Google. Reminded me of Yahoo when you could search things from broad categories down to narrower one. I also started to feel a bit more comfortable with tags, with the idea of suggested tags such as those used previously by yourself and others. Still not keen on the uncontrolled vocabulary though! Also can see that tags are more flexible than folders as many tags can be applied to a website rather than filing it under one category.

I had a look at the SLNSW delicious account. I am guessing that the bigger and bolder tags are the more common ones?

I had a look at Sutherland Libraries tags- found it a bit confusing as the page was divided in two. I could see the groups of tags on the right but wasn't sure how they connected to the left hand part. Cleveland Public Library had a much clearer site until I clicked on a link and back to del.icio.us.

Will leave the "explore" section and technorati for another time. Enough of looking at a computer screen, time to lie under the doona and look at a BOOK!