Social Bookmarking and Tagging

The whole idea of social bookmarking had me confused at first. I'm aware of tagging because I've been tagged in various Facebook photos, however I was not familiar with del.icio.us and its capabilities. I tried to play the short video to learn more about it but the public PC's would not play sound and my home computer makes everyone sound like a chipmunk. So I visited the del.icio.us site and read up about social bookmarking. From my understanding it's a site where I can save some of my favourite websites in the one place. I see it as being similar to the 'favourites' icon on my desktop. The difference being that I can access del.icio.us from any computer rather than just my own pc.

I think this is really useful technology. There are sites I visit frequently and it would be good to keep the links to these sites in a place I can use from any computer. It is also extremely handy for research purposes. I am starting my masters course this year and del.icio.us would be a great place to store sites associated with my research so that I can go back and view them whenever and whereever I need to. I can also look at sites that others have tagged that may be relevant to my topic of study.

It is interesting to see how Ann Arbor District Library has used social bookmarking and tagging in their information service. They have tag clouds showing the most popular tags in their catalog. They list the top 10 tags and most recent tags. This is something that could be used in all library services. It would allow patrons to view items associated with a paticular tagged subject.It would also give an indication of community interests by looking at the popularity of the tags. However this would not give us a complete indication for any statistical purpose because not all library patrons will use the catalog or go online frequently. This is very likely to change in the future so social bookmarking and tagging would definately be a good option for the library and information service.