LIS 9763

So sorry for the late blog post!  It's just been one of those weeks where things just don't seem to be going my way.  Anyhow, here are my thoughts on this week's topic.

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090122/forbes_twit...
I saw a story all about Twitter on CTV newsnet this evening, so I thought I'd share.  The TV report on it discussed how Obama even has a Twitter, and that other politicians are using it as well.  The news article also mentions the pros and cons. Enjoy!

Generally speaking, I am one to agree with Porter, who notes that social bookmarking and tagging is most useful as a means of organizing one’s own digital content on their terms; as he says, “personal value precedes network value.” However, I do not view bookmarking and tagging as some sort of keyword-revolution that trumps the powers of more “top-down,” static means of structuring the organization of information.

Alright, here's the deal.  As those of you who were in the chatroom late on Wednesday night have already put up with me grumping about how delicious is no longer my friend.  As I said starting out, I'm on Co-Op at the moment with the federal government, and my project is developing several subject guides using delicious.  I have been neck-deep in tagging (on and off) for the last two months.  It's not all I've been doing by any means, but it's been taking up my time in significant chunks.
 

Hello eveyone. This week I have been inspired by our readings to think what are libraries all about?

On another note, I'm taking another course where we discuss information seeking behaviour of users (consumers).  It strikes me that if tags get well used (e.g. in LibraryThing) there is the potential for librarians to use those tags as a way to understand how consumers view their inforamtion, learn from those metatags, and improve or adjust our services to them.

I have been using Delicious for a while, probably about two years, but I have a confession…I don’t always use it to find my old tags.  I do very occasionally use it to find websites that other people have tagged, but not my own, which is what I thought I would have used the tags for. 

The world wide web is a large dumping of information. If you want it, it's out there! Anything, all without any standard classification schemes. Terabytes of information sitting on my PC, your laptop, a server belonging to some guy on the other side of the world, everywhere, and anywhere in between. To help navigate this information beast, people bookmark and tag information. This is great, for the individual user. What about the rest of us? Cue social bookmarking and tagging.

    I think this week’s readings have been the most beneficial to me so far in this course. I really thought I understood social tagging, and to put it bluntly, I didn’t really know why anyone would be interested in it. I heard the term and thought ‘social’ before thinking ‘tagging’. I’ve heard in several interviews and articles that when you use these types of sites, the chances of you really being exposed to any new topics are minimal because you are likely to encounter people similar to yourself in these environments.