#13 Tagging, folksomonies and social bookmarking in Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us - an odd name - I have often wondered how they came up with that name! I think the idea of sharing links like this is good - I used to do it with Furl and it sort of went by the wayside.

The great thing is that you can see what others have 'bookmarked' with the same tags and find sites that you may not have known about.

I can see a real use for this in academia, for teaching with students. You can have a link on Facebook to Del.icio.us links. Wouldn't it be good for a lecturer to set up a FB account for the subject and then use Del.icio.us to mark sites that the students needed to look at for their studies. Just a way to bring the learning into 'their space'.

I created a Del.icio.us account for myself, but had to do it from home, because of the IT restrictions we have at work. I wasn't too keen on having to download something onto my tool bar though - I don't like external things that are supposed to think for you - I find they can often have a lot of spy ware with them

On the whole. quite a good way to bookmark remotely.

Week 3 - Flickr

Playing with Flickr was an interesting exercise. I found it quite easy to use, but there was some differences to work out first - organising sets and batches etc. Photsharing isn't new - when I was studying and first started using the internet, a study buddy used to use webshots to share her photos with her family overseas, as she was from Hong Kong. There are other photo sharing sites around, but Flickr has some very innovative tools that it offers users.

Being able to tag photos means that uses can browse for categories that interest them (I guess we can link it to libraries and say that we are cataloguing them :-) ) Collaborative tagging just uses keywords insteaod of authority files. While I like the idea of collaborative tagging (folksonomy) because it can make it more user friendly, it can make it harder to support searching when compared to browsing items with tags from controlled vocabularies. Imagine how the content can get out of control?? Imagine tagging photos with something as general as beach - add those photos to all the other photos on in the world that have been tagged with the word 'beach'. How many will think to be more precise or to retag their images? Ok, so my background can get in the way a little... :-)


One thing I really liked about Flickr was the way I could make some photos viewable to the public and leave some private. I also liked how I could invite people and give them only access to view certain batches or access to anything I posted. I put my niece's christening photos up and only wanted my family to look at them. I have a bit of a thing about photos being public on the internet.

Part of our marketing plan for a conference I am convening is to have a Flickr site with photos added regularly so that we can add interest and variety to our site. Stay tuned for more information!