Thing #13

Delicious is a really interesting tool! I'd used Yahoo's bookmarking tool before, but it didn't have the tagging capability the way delicious does. Although you could separate them into categories, which was nice.


I did a little tag browsing. One of the most helpful ones to me was the imaging tag. I found all sorts of free stock photo sites. When I put up my personal web page for the contest, I threw it together with string and duct tape. Well, okay, wingdings and Paint. But still. I want to make it fancy schmancy but in a cheapo way. Some of the free photo sites are better than others, but I think I might be able to find something to play with.


I did find that a lot of the more general tags, like "books" "reading" "writing" were a little bit difficult to navigate. Books, for example, got me Amazon.com, a blog called "What Claudia Wore" and everything in between. Really, that's the main limitation I saw.


As far as on the job use, social bookmarking could be a really good way to keep all of the websites that our patrons use on a regular basis all in one place. Take the big mythology project: in Smyrna we have two different schools with lots of kids doing Greek mythology projects simultaneously. If the teachers let us know in advance we can have some reputable sites picked out and ready to go in addition to our print materials like pantheon.org.


Being the readers' advisory nut that I am, I always look for a way to incorporate the latest tools into it. We can use social bookmarking to put all of our R.A. resources in one place, systemwide, for the whole staff to use. Fantastic Fiction, AquaBrowser, Amazon, Library Thing, ETC. This way, too, if someone at a branch finds something nifty, they can bookmark it for the rest of us.


Normally I do the Discover More exercises for the 2.0 lessons. And I'll do this one eventually. But, although it is an extremely useful practice, I find tagging to be completely tedious and tend to put it off.