Thing #10

First off, let me say that I am SO happy Delicious dropped all of its dots... I'd feel my blood pressure go up every time I read d.e.l.i.c.i.o.u.s..... silly, I know, but we all have our quirks!

With that said, I have not jumped onboard the tagging train, even though I find it quite useful. When I was first introduced to social bookmarking a year ago, and Delicious in particular, I discovered I was not very comfortable with it. Part of my unease was because the structure was so fluid. You say tomato, I say tomato. The use of folksonomies in tagging makes sense in the world of collaboration, but I had this undying resistance to using it. Now, a year later, I am still not using Delicious, even though I have an account and have explored the site. And as you can tell by my blog posts, I'm not one for adding tags, or labels as Blogger calls them. (I did make the effort, as an exception, for this post just to show that I'm willing to change.)

I DO believe it is a great tool though... especially for reference work. I don't think there is an easier way to share and use bookmarks than Delicious. What a great way to collect and manage bookmarks for a group of people to utilize in their information sharing efforts. Reviewing NEFLIN's Delicious account is all the more reason why reference departments should utilize this great resource.

An article published in the NYT suggests not blowing your nose while you have a cold. This caught my eye because I am currently battling a painful sinus infection. I used that particular article to compare Furl and Delicious and found them to be very similar. The only real difference I saw was the aesthetic layout of the sites. Both provided statistical information such as how many people had tagged a particular site/article. Furl provided links to other sites tagged by those who tagged the article I read. I did not see that function on Delicious, but I may have missed it while I was blowing my nose.