Thing 10- Tagging and Delicious

Tagging is an open and informal method of categorizing that allows users to associate keywords with online content (web pages, pictures, posts). Tagging is completely unstructured and freeform- allowing users to create connections between data any way they want. If you go to Flickr, and do a search for an abstract term like "happiness", you will see what I mean. Tags are like subject headings; however, there is no thesaurus or authority control. Users assign the tags that are meaningful to them. This sounds like chaos to most librarians; however, it actually works well in the web environment.

You can read more about tagging in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_(metadata)

You can use tags in Flickr, Delicious, Library Thing, and a number of Web 2.0 applications. Some OPACs have started supporting user tagging, including ours (LS2 PAC). To explore the use of tags today, we'll be looking at Delicious, a social bookmarking site that allows you bookmark websites, retrieve those websites from any computer, and share your bookmarked sites with others. You can organize the sites that you bookmark by tagging them.

In Common Craft's explanation of social bookmarking, using the Favorites button on your browser is the old way to get back to your favorite websites. The limitation here is that you only have those bookmarks on one computer! With a social bookmarking site, not only you can access your bookmarks from any computer with an Internet connection, you can tag them so they are easy to share with others. In my own opinion, it's a value-added service: when you add a tag to a website, you enable other users to find that website when they search with the tag (keyword) you just assigned to it. That's the social part- intelligent humans are assigning the keywords. If you are finding a website using a search engine, the words used to pull up websites are found by computers. You share your treasures with others just by labeling them.

Let's look at this in action. Go to the Delicious website at http://www.delicious.com/, and set up your own Delicious account. Performing registration steps 2 (Add Buttons) and 3 (importing bookmarks) are not required, but are recommended for this Thing. When you are finished registering, please add at least three bookmarks to your Delicious by clicking on "Save a new bookmark." Another option you might consider is downloading the Delicious toolbar; it enables you to bookmark sites by simplying clicking on a toolbar Delicious icon, among other things. Spend some time looking at other people's bookmarks or exploring a tag.

Please make a post on your blog about your experiences with Delicious and your thoughts on tagging in general. Post a link to your Delicious page within your blog post.