Comparison Shopping October 18, 2006
I really like the looks of my new BlinkList account but I wish I could import my del.icio.us account! I know I should be able to but my passwords don’t seem to work for their export to xml del.icio.us page. I love looking at my colourful cloud, the images of the webpages next to the links, and being a ipod user I love that I can rate the sites with stars. That would be very useful for a library when social bookmarking because the users could let you know how much they appreciate your links.
I tried CiteULike out once before and magically remembered my account password! Miracle! But just looking at it again made me cringe because I remember how much typing I had to do to insert one reference. I believe it only automatically populates the bibliographic information from one database.
I was watching for Zotero to come out!!! I can’t believe how techie I sound right now, what a fluke. It promised to do a way better job than CiteULike and it has a cooler Web2.0 name… And check this out: “Zotero may also automatically grab LC subject headings (for books) and keywords for articles” when tagging! That’s great news for librarians! Now all I want to know is, how can I import my del.icio.us bookmarks???
I agree that the Zotera feature of “grabbing” LC subject headings is very promising for libraries. It would be a good feature for other such tools to adopt. On The Blog, Mark suggests that users could get a start on searching with the natural “tag” language. Then, if a way could be found to achieve it, users could be led to the controlled vocabulary term…sounds like library 1.2 or 2.1 if you ask me.