LIS 9763

I’m in total agreement about how quickly this semester has flown by – shocking! Hard to believe this is my final blog post…but here we go with answers to the lucky 7 questions:
 
1.      Has your view of social software changed since starting this course? If so, how?
 

       Our assignment this week was to create a prototype that could demonstrate the usefulness of social media.

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.
 

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 focus of our group project was to create an online teen community where ideas can be shared and learning can take place using a social bookmarking tool. We wanted to create a venue for teenagers to recommend books, movies, etc. to other teens and the library using tags. At the same time, librarians will use this social bookmarking tool to learn about teen interests and recommend resources, both in the library and on the web, that may be of interest to teens. For example, some teens may tag books, movies, etc. from retailers such as amazon/chapters/futureshop/etc.

Oh tagging and social bookmarking, how good an idea you truly are.  But how do we get everyone on board?

The Bokardo reading says a lot of what I feel about tagging, but especially when it is mentioned that users won't tag things if they don't feel that they have to or if there is no clear incentive.  Even then, people may not tag.  In some cases, as with my livejournal, I thought about tagging and how it would be useful for organization and finding memories - but in the end I never bothered.

A couple of questions came up about delicious & the weekly tagging exercise during our course chat earlier this week, so I thought I'd pull together a few pointers.