Delicious.com: OLJ Task

I set up a delicious account in March as part of my learning process for INF506. After setting up my account I established a network with two other user groups namely "SISsocialmedia" and "Lyn_Hay" in order to share subject relevant sites that I had found on the web. I bookmarked and tagged a number of sites on my delicious account for others on these networks to browse. By using community developed tags I was able to search for other relevant bookmarked material from these networks.

By sharing and tagging relevant sites in Delicious in this way a community of users in INF506 has been able to construct a specific and relevant community library of digital resources with its own specific tag categories, relationships and folksonomies. This emergent community meta data ecology has some good advantages over the relatively remote, and commonly imposed traditional taxonomic ontologies constructed by information professionals in traditional institutional environments. Specifically the created meta data tags are more likely to be meaningful within the specific discursive and knowledge communities from which they where created to serve. This will not only simplify item retrieval for community users but will also aid with knowledge building as relatively informed links and relationships between sites can be generated through community tagging practices. Some of the known limitations associated with the use of uncontrolled vocabularies will be mitigated by the enforcement of known community standards and culture in the online environment.

Overall I have found Delicious to be both an attractive and relatively easy site for bookmarking and sharing resources with others of similar interests. I specifically liked searching through the tag ecology that has been established by the various groups and networks. Information professionals could use this to better understand how people arrange and organize information. The strengths and weakness associated with the use of uncontrolled vocabularies can be assessed and evaluated in a dynamic information environment. Librarians can then use this understanding to improve Meta data standards or even have there production decentralized to some degree. Organizing and finding information on the internet certainly represents a challenge for information professionals and users alike. Social Tagging represents a useful experiment for harnessing the power and knowledge of communities and individuals to do just this.

I have also tried Diigo as an alternative social bookmarking site. Although it is not as popular as delicious at the moment. This site does provide some useful or more flexible ways of downloading and archiving content from the web for sharing with others.