Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Week 6 # 13 Tagging, folksonomies and del.icio.us

I have looked in the websites suggested in ACL Learning 2.0 and in Wikipedia for the entries on del.icio.us and folksonomy, and from these I have gleaned that del.icio.us is a web service for storing and sharing web bookmarks. Users can choose their keywords freely and tag their bookmarks with these keywords, rather than with the controlled vocabulary which as librarians we are accustomed to, such as in LoC subject headings.
Folksonomy [folk + taxonomy] is the practice of creating and managing tags to organise content, in collaboration with other like-minded users. A folksonomy therefore uses a shared vocabulary that would be familiar to its users. It is intended to make a body of information increasingly easy to search and navigate over time.
I can see this would be extremely useful to groups with a similar interest to build up a shared list of websites relevant to their interest. The big advantage of del.icio.us is that because your bookmarks are stored in your account on the del.icio.us website, you can access it from any computer, whereas a conventional list of favourites is stored only a particular computer.
I think that folksonomies could easily take up huge chunks of time - one would have to be ruthless and cull one’s bookmarks periodically. However, they would be extremely useful to someone doing a course of study, for example, for accessing and sharing resources with others.

2 comments:

Fruitsalad said...

Neighbour...very good work...nice blog!

Unknown said...

Agree that this area can be useful as well as being an excellent time waster