Monday, June 30, 2008

Thing 11: Tagging and Del.icio.us

I've spent a lot of time on this one because it's huge. Which made it seem difficult for me to comment on. But I'm just going to forge ahead and not get bogged down. Also, I am particularly fuzzy-headed today, not for any fun reason, but simply because I am drained. I've been staggering around wondering why I'm so tired for the last few weeks and then I realized that the children are up much later with these long summer days and man, it's doing a number on me. Oh, for the dreary winter. Kidding.

So: del.icio.us.

Very cool and clearly a higher evolution of the old Furl app I fooled around with back in the day. Del.icio.us is the web within The Web. This whole trend of sites that enable us to monkey-vine swing from our interests to similar interests held by others is so cool, and so addictive. And so potentially time-consuming. I'm thinking here of Good Reads and Library Thing, both of which can easily chew up an afternoon. Also Netflix, now that I think of it.

So I set up an account and with the idea in mind of finding some good reader's advisory lists that will help me identify books to read to Eldest. I started at the Newbery Medal site. Tagged it with "kiddie lit".

23 other people have tagged the Newbery site. I followed the "kidslit" tag posted by bibliaugrapher to see what other sites he/she had listed. Mostly UK reader's advisory sites.

Then I sat back and tried to really think about how this app could really be used. Could it help with business research? I did a search for "green corporate". I got 1970 hits, some of them pretty good. I also got a list of related tags. This is useful! I could see using this tool for research, sure. One could dig their way down to fairly decent information pretty rapidly.

Does anyone know the reason behind the name? Am I the only person who finds it to be vaguely annoying?

3 comments:

Fresca said...

Stop! Stop! Stop telling me about new and interesting toys and tags and tootles!
Just kidding. Of course I want to hear more--especially if someone else fun (you) does the research and explains it to me.
I admit I have seen del.ic... links all over the place but didn't want to go down that road, so I'm grateful you did it for me.
Now I can spend more time on iMovie!

Jennifer said...

I find the name annoying as well! I can never remember what goes where...

At the moment I use del.icio.us (I can only remember it because I iknow it ends with "us" because it's a United States site) mostly just as a sort of centralized bookmarks. When I see something at home that I know I might want to give my students, I tack a "class" tag on it; when I come across a recipe at school I might want to use at home I throw the page in "recipes." It's good for remembering those odd pages you rarely look at and such. I haven't used it as a research tool so much as a personal organizer, but it's always really interesting to see who tags which pages with what...

Rudyinparis said...

Ha! Tags and tootles!

I'm still mulling over tags.

Jen, thanks for the ".us" part. Although I'm still baffled.