Delicious and Technorati - Assigment 6 (and learning, still)

When I saw "social bookmarking" I was thinking...party; only for fun not business; sharing with friends. But Isoon learned that it is more about the commonality of "tag" given to a particular URL by the throngs of people who visit it. The tag that rises to the top will be the most popular one. And many tags are show as "clouds" so that the most frequently used tag will appear BOLD large print while the tag names that appear less frequently will appear in small lighter print. It is kind of like the survival of the fittest. The users of social bookmarking in Delicious will be shown the cloud of various tags for a particular URL. The user can then use one of the previously used tags or they may create their own, which will be added to the cloud.

I found a personal benefit in social bookmarking as well. Rather than storing my "favourites" in my computer, (which seems to slow down my system), I save the favourites as bookmarks in a site like Delicious and then give them tags to label them in a way that makes sense to me. I can also see how others have tagged the same bookmarked site.This also allows me to access my favourites from any computer that I may be using.
Below is an example of a tag cloud:

1 2 area balcony beachfront condo days dining diningkitchen florida from indian indianrocksbeachrental irb irbcondorental living master meaghan michaels monica mosaic peters pool rental rocks room suite sunset vatican view wedding

This is a cloud created in FLICKR illustrating all of the tags that I have used to label my pictures that I have saved there. Note that wedding pictures are the most frequently used. And it looks as though I have more pictures of Meaghan and Peters wedding than I have for Michael and Monica's wedding.

Delicious, is just one of many social bookmarking sites. Some are more specific sites like FLICKR for photographs and Technorati for searching blogs.

Tagging is the key to controlling and organizing your online experience — be it a learning experience or an entertainment experience — and sharing it with others. It uses terms you choose, your vocabulary, as opposed to library cataloging terminology, to meaningfully apply descriptive terms to a website, photograph, video, document or music. Tags can be anything, even non-linguistic symbols. As you select tags and apply them, you are building your very own classification system from the ground up. It is fun and very creative!

I found another group of people learning about WEB2.0 on a Delicious site and I learnt quite a bit from reading their blogs. They too were library types learning about other technologies.

If you are interested, their blogs can be found at :http://krl2pt0.wordpress.com/. I found some of their insights and learning interesting.

I have created my delicious account and I am impressed with the flexibility that it has. I am still learning and experimenting but I have found tags of a few people that I know (one is a manager with RWL who used the same tag as I did).

I have gone back to Delicious each day this week and I am building my confidence level in using this site.

With more experience using Delicious, I can see how it will be another useful tool for me. However, I will have to get into blogging and sharing blogs with others.

I have also had several trips to Technorati but and I see that it is the similar to... but different than many of the sites we have seen so far.

The popular tags in Technorati today are : OBAMA, McCain, Politics, Football and the Economy. Yes... the site is used mainly by patriotic Americans. All of the political links seemed to be about their election. Not even a whisper about Canada. Although there was an newslink about the Blackberry and Rim in the business section.

I find it very easy to find blogs and other links in Technorati about a number of topics.

I promise to have fun during my "week off" as well.