Nibbling at delicious information

I enjoyed exploring the searching and sorting options in Delicious.  It was fun to look at the history of links bookmarked, and to check out the bookmarks of other people who bookmarked one of the same sites I did.  I found a person whose name I recognized, and enjoyed looking over his bookmarks.  I had some sense of his interests from communications on an email list, and it was interesting to see what else was revealed by his choices on Delicious. 

As with other social networking tools, one of the trickiest parts of using a social bookmarking site is filtering the available information.  I can see using this method of browsing linkages to find other interesting bookmarks under at least two circumstances:

·         When I’m in the mood to poke around and enjoy browsing.  If I’m in a hurry to find particular information, sorting through the bookmarks of others would likely be very frustrating. 

·         When I want to find other people who seem to have similar interests.  Again I’d need to be in an exploratory mood.  If I found someone with a high proportion of bookmarks that interested me, I could either add that person (or organization) to my network or subscribe to their RSS feeds, so I could check out their bookmarks in the future.  Right now, the most useful people in my network are my fellow students, since their current interests align so closely with mine!

For either of these uses, I’ll need to spend quite a bit more time on the social aspects of bookmarking, rather than just saving my own discoveries for later use.  I might also give a little more thought to how I tag and describe the bookmarks I save, so that they’re more useful for other people.  I have been thinking of my own needs when tagging—so, for instance, I often don’t use the tag ‘library’ or ‘libraries’, since so many of my interests relate to libraries.  Because of their high frequency, those are not especially useful tags for my own collection (at least right now).  Yet I depend on other people using those tags, so I can narrow down my searches on Delicious.  Oops.  In the spirit of contributing to the community, I guess I’ll go back and beef up my tagging…

Note for classmates and instructor:  Since the instructions for exercise 5 listed a couple of different options for tagging our bookmarks for the exercise, I settled on using 'exercise5' in addition to the '246bell' I've been using for all class-related bookmarks in Delicious.