Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati

Delicious
I think Delicious is genius because i can never keep track of my fav sites. Delicious allows you to organize and access your bookmarks from any computer. So far, when I found a site I liked, I just bookmarked it. As a result, I have tons of bookmarks saved on my computer and it's one big mess. Strangely, I don't use the folder filing system in the bookmark option; I find it annoying or maybe I'm lazy. Anyways all the bookmarks get listed together in one massive list and I need to I scroll though to find the site I want.

Delicious helps me tag and organize my sites. I just signed up for an account and installed the firefox bookmarklet. It allows you to tag your bookmarks directly from your browser and it gets saved automatically into you Delicious account! I also like that you can see what other tags people have used and you can subscribe to RSS feed for a particular url.

I have to say the best feature of Delicious is the transportability; it's an online bookmarking tool. You can sign in onto any computer and get access to your Delicious account and all your bookmarks are right there.

p.s. The 2nd link in the Discovery resources on Tagging in Learning 2.0 is bad, I got an error message. Anyone run into this problem?

Technorati
I've never heard of it before or thought it was even possible, but there's even a search engine for blogs = Technorati. It searches using an algorithm using tags/keywords. (I'm getting that tag/keywords are an important aspect of 2.0). =)

Technorati offers a blog directory, Top 100 list, tag index and even categories to search/browse from. There's even a video section!

I tried the discovery exercise and put in Learning 2.0 in the search field. Under Blogs it found 0 hits, but under posts it found 66047 hits. Each hit lists the title of the post, title of the blog, when it was posted, and also partial sentences of how the search terms is being used in the blog.

Again, some of the links in Learning 2.0 had some issues:
Discover page - got an error, says page doesn't exist
Popular blog, searches, and tags - page says its unavailable.

I would definitely use Technorati and just added it to my Delicious account.

Away from the Icebergs
Just in case collections.
Difficulty letting go.
User centered services.
Patron education.

Working at the Art Library, our collection is very specialized yet we've tried to make more user centered services available. One example would be our reserve readings. Most of the students prefer to get the readings electronically, so we scan and post the readings online to the library website. Students can access these reading when and wherever they want.

At first, many of the professors had "difficulty letting go" of the traditional mindset - come into the library and use the resources in person. But many have realized that this is what the student want and so they've compromised; taken it to where they are (the Internet). We place the electronic readings online, but also provide the books (just in case collections) for those students who prefer to come in. The reason mainly being because of the color plates and illustrations.

The overall encompassing idea is about creating user centered services. Users want convenience and they use technology to accomplish this purpose. If this is the now, libraries have to be more proactive and willing to adapt to change. Like the author said, we can't expect users to come to us, we need to go to them or we'll be left behind.