Tagging: I opted to tag my Flickr photos rather than the Blogger entries. Perhaps it’s because most of the posts are similar in nature, or perhaps it’s because my creative mind has not been activated by my Caribou Lite White Latte with a shot of raspberry. Either way, I was not inspired to tag those posts. If I do, they’ll all say TechStuff. Boring. I did tag my pictures in Flickr, because I use those pictures in a number of ways and it’s handy to be able to pull up the ones I need.
I use tags a LOT on a LibraryThing account I set up for my church library. In fact, the physical library is organized around the tags on that site. I believe this site will be featured in another Thing, so I’m not going to spend much time talking about it here, but the tagging function of LibraryThing is awesome. I love using the subject clouds.
I just have to pause a moment because I’m feeling a little fahrklempt (which is a much funnier word when you say it, rather than spell it). Del.icio.us ROCKS!! I’ve been avoiding using it, even though I see it everywhere, because it’s “just one more thing to maintain.” I played with it for a few minutes and fell in love. I like the fact that the buttons are on the toolbar, and you can tag items immediately, rather than having to click through pages to use a site like Foxmarks. I won’t give up Foxmarks because I like having my personal bookmarks follow me around in a familiar interface, but I love the tagging feature on Del.icio.us. I star posts in Google Reader, but it just dumps everything in a pile. I went through all of my starred posts and added tags to them in Del.icio.us. (UPDATE: I LIED!!!! On a hunch, I searched the help files on Google Reader. Lo and behold, it lets you tag posts, and add them to Digg and Delicious. Whoopee!! Jumpin’ up and down. Now I’ll be off to tag my Reader posts for a bit).
The tag cloud in Del.icio.us made me a little woozy – I found some really useful sites in there. This is site is going to be my new best friend. Typing that word over and over is annoying, though. I always forget where the periods go.
For students and teachers, I like Pagekeeper. It’s got a clean interface – Del.icio.us is obviously a free-for-all and most teachers like a little quality control (at least at the elem-middle level). Our media specialists have been amassing lists of links for students, but there are so many more on Pagekeeper. I could see this - if not replacing - greatly enhancing the list of links. It’s also handy to be able to search other teacher’s sites for links, and see how many they have gathered. I, of course, added this to my Del.icio.us bookmarks because it’s so FREAKING COOL. Sorry. Latte time.
I checked out FURL, and it has one feature that I really like – archiving tagged pages. I am debating whether to start an account on FURL, rather than Del.icio.us, but I gave that one such high marks (note previous “FREAKING” tag) that I don’t really want to start over. FURL did lead me to Colbert’s Wikiality – The Truthiness Encyclopedia. That’s a big plus, for sure.
The social bookmarking .pdf was really valuable. The lack of oversight and possible political/personal slant of tags are certainly relevant issues in a library (and I’m thinking about the hours I pained over my graduate cataloging class). Without having used it with students, it’s hard to judge, but these sites seem to offer great productivity enhancement. Or yet another way of killing valuable time strapped obsessively to the intertubes. Whatever.
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