SocialSocial October 18, 2006

Well, after all this time using del.icio.us we’ve finally made it to social bookmarking! Great! One theme that appears again and again through this week’s readings is Hammond’s concept of ’selfish’ vs. ‘altruistic’ tagging; Udell’s ’self-interested personal information management’ vs. a ’social’ system; and Porter’s ‘personal value’ vs. ‘network value’. What they are all talking about is the dual nature of social bookmarking: first and foremost people who use del.icio.us are saving bookmarks to use at a later date, but they are also (perhaps not intentionally) tagging web pages for other del.icio.us users to find. This commentary has made me aware of the uselessness of some of my tags to anyone who is not me (lis757_required) and the usefulness of others (SocialBookmarking).

For me, these (random) points also stood out from this weeks readings:

• tagging does not use the hierarchical structures of formal classification systems, it is flat (Hammond)
• a disadvantage of tags is that they are often ambiguous becaues people use them in different ways, for example I may tag restaurant reviews ‘food’ while someone else may tag recipes ‘food’ (Mathes)
• Flickr lets you have spaces in tags while del.icio.us doesn’t (Mathes)
• I have the del.icio.us extension for firefox and use it all the time, but I didn’t notice the sidebar feature (Hollenback)

Finally, thanks to these readings I can see how tagging would help patrons better retrieve items from library catalogues (as a supplemental method to teaching them traditional keyword and subject searching) and next I will explore the case studies to see how libraries are responding to this need…