Thing 10: Tagging and Folksonomies (Delicious.com)

I used to use Delicious quite a bit at my previous job.  As it was an FE college there wasn't much in the way of e-resources, nor was there a gateway/portal to the ones we did have.  There are also many good, free websites to suport literacy and numeracy so I used Delicious to collect these together and promote them.  

For this job I started to collect particular websites, such as statistics websites, as there are many of those available, particularly for European statistics.  Also when going through reading lists I tried to keep the websites recommended on my Delicious accout, tagging them with the module code. 

I have been on training courses where they provide a Delicious page of related websites, some of which are used in the training session and some of which are useful for reference post-session.  I've always thought this to be a good use of Delicious.  One such example is a JISC screencasting training session I went to recently- you can see their Delicious page here.

However, my enthusiasm for Delicious comes in waves.  I have months when I don't use it and forget all about it and then months when I decide it's a good idea and go tagging mad.  I'm not convinced though. Advantages include: it's very easy to add bookmarks, particularly if you have the internet browser add-on; you can subscribe to other people's tags so you can see what they're adding to their accounts in a topic of your interest; there are widgets available to help promote your tags on your blog; you can send and receive bookmark suggestions from other users; plus you can automatically post any bookmarks you add to Twitter, promoting them beyond the bounds of Delicious.  Still I struggle to find it really essentially useful and I am inclined to agree with fellow Wmin23-er James' thoughts on Delicious.

Nevertheless I have added the gadget below from my Delicious account.  I have just added in some links related to my favourite musician, David Ford, to make my bookmarks significantly more interesting than just having business-related websites on there.  

Summary of thing 10: A useful tool for collecting together websites on a topic but I am unconvinced about the merits of tagging/folksonomies and using this as a discovery tool.  If I wanted to find websites on a particular topic I'm not sure Delicious would be my first port of call.  I like the RSS features though and the tagging-RSS combination may be a more useful discovery tool.

Photo: Pudding at Paco's, Newcastle taken by Ellie