Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

Learning my way around Del.icio.us has been fun. Of course, I had to set up an account and import my favorites from my computer in the HS Media Center. So I have spent the last few hours tagging sites, trying to remember why I bookmarked a site in the first place, and deleting dead or no longer useful links. Because I travel between buildings, I will find this site very useful. I have often wanted to return to a site that I had bookmarked on another computer. Now my bookmarks will follow me. How useful! I have installed the Internet Explorer buttons on my home computer and my new school laptop (which was already on its way to solving the problem of me being away from the computer where I set up the bookmark or it would have been once I transferred my old bookmarks to it.)

I can see this as being very useful when groups of people are doing research on a topic. Agreeing on tags beforehand will allow them to share bookmarks they discover. I have already had fun looking at the bookmarks of people who have used some of the same tags I used.

I briefly looked at PageKeeper. Our new website program rSchool lets us set up our own pages of links. PageKeeper or del.icio.us would be useful for helping to find links to put on our own page. I don't think I'd have very many takers if I suggested that they go to a different website to create an acoount and create a links page there.

I had been tagging my blogs since the beginning but I did go through and add some tags. While I think tagging is cool, I am a little leary of the lack of controlled vocabulary. It can get to be quite a guessing game to try to figure out why a site got the tags it did. It can also be something of a problem if one day I tag a site Teens and the next day tag a site YA or Young Adult. I was tempted when I finished tagging the websites I kept in the transfer to change the tags on sites that had unique tags. A person's tags list can get pretty unwieldy quickly.