#13 Tagging

Del.icio.us


A lot of the sites I've looked at during the Learning 23 Things journey have used tags - Flickr, LibraryThing, del.icio.us and Blogger, and all of them designed for social networking. I like the idea that I can organise my bookmarked sites and store them in a more meaningful way, but the more I look at other people's sites, the more I start to wonder, why do I want to know who else tagged the same site as me? It was interesting to see what other sites people had tagged - a bit like ordering books from Amazon and being told that other people who bought the same book as me also bought these titles......

For Amazon it's a marketing ploy, kind of like up sizing your order. On the web, do I really want to know what others are tagging? Does a site with a lot of tags mean it is more useful? (sometimes it does, but not all sites I found with a lot of tags looked that useful).

Del.icio.us is easy to use and I installed the tagging button on my home computer it's the same as adding a site to your favourites. I didn't look around del.icio.us enough to see if I can upload an existing set of bookmarks like Rollyo, but it would be good to be able to export the collection I have.

I can see the potential for the social tagging of information, but the librarian in me still wants to evaluate the source of the tags and question why I should be using their recommendations.