Thing 11. Tagging and Del.icio.us

Now I am getting excited...this is something very new for me, the idea of tagging articles on the web that I can actually find later on, and can share with others...I know this Del.icio.us has been around for awhile, and I vaguely have heard of it, but this is the first time where I have really explored the possibilities -- and I credit 23 Things! I am very impressed....I was playing around on the site and found so many cool pieces of information and ideas that I never would have found searching the straight browser way, that is, having to think of all the search terms and connections myself...now I finally realize there are people out there who have already done it for you particularly if you use a site like Del.icio.us to do the browsing. I think I feel a little embarrassed not having used this method before...guess that's why I am called Shocker boy...I am easily shocked at what I don't know.

But this is a very impressive tool..enough for me to really sign up for my own account and be willing to download (a scary thing?!) their own buttons to have on my IE toolbar. Now I have an extremely easy way to tag my own web articles and also a direct and quick way to go to a listing of all my favorites on their site. One thing to point out, though, is that like all these programs out there, there is a learning curve on all the many things you can do with it, such as how to set up networks of private connections, or even the best way to do searching for other peoples favorites--making up your own accurate tags is an art in itself, harder than you think, but also learning how the site uses these tags is a trial and error exercise. For example, are you able to group tags together to find something--in other words, is the search engine using "or" statements between tags or "and" statements for the various terms...and sometimes it seems to be checking for terms within an article if there is no tag attached...I know I will need more experience searching with this site--its still a little confusing since the explanations on the best ways to search using the tags is meager on the site's help page...so it might be best to just figure it out yourself by experimenting with test searches...

But in any case, for a library, what a great way for customers to work together in an intelligent way, to find the best stuff on the web, and save it for others to see...So far, however, I don't see my own library encouraging the public to use this type of site at all, so there might still be the problem of figuring out a way to easily attract customers to voluntarily participate in using and sharing web discoveries within the confines of an off-site web site...maybe,of course, when allowing the public to work together through a library web site, there is that fear of having the responsibility for what people come up with and put out there via a public library web site...I think in WEB 2.0 terms this is covered under the topic of "trusting" your customers...I imagine, still a scary idea for a government entity like the public library...

Anyway, I was so happy learning about this tool that I went back to a previous tool--Flickr--and this time started tagging much more than I did before---this can be extremely useful when done thoughtfully I have learned, and I think I have been converted on the benefits!