Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Tastes like a giant zucchini


Having just listened to two podcasts about del.icio.us, I'm wondering why I might need to sign up for yet another social networking account that gathers all my interests in one place. I've already got a bloglines account that monitors more than blogs (comics, f'rinstance). I already look at friends' blogs to see who/what they link to and follow. I already do the same with MySpace and people's YouTube accounts by looking at their friends, favorites, and subscribed channels. I can already search YouTube and Flickr with their folksonomies of tags.

So as I explore our library system's del.icio.us learning site, I'm still not impressed. Maybe I'm just grumpy today (tomorrow I turn 39, the edge of codger-dom). I'm not really interested in what 297 people have to say about a particular website that someone else has chosen for me.

I can see using this as a branch-wide or system-wide bookmarking system. We could for example, share the best link for the pet-food poisoning recall and not find it only when we have time to check our e-mail. Elusive tax-help websites would be seasonally appropriate, and we could tag them with not only what we and the IRS label the info, but with words that patrons use to describe what they are looking for.

So, to me, del.icio.us is about as tasty as a giant zucchini. Needs salt. And lotsa cheese.

1 comment:

Stephanie said...

Hmmm...you seem to know your way around flickr better than me. You'll have to show me how to do all the fun things you are learning. I just know how to upload my pics! I also changed up my myspace account a little thanks to your link. So..keep on learnin' for both of us!!