Delicious bookmarking

Well, the name doesn't give anything away about what it is. Delicious is in fact a social bookmarking website where you can keep all of your websites in one place and organise them with tags. I kind of get what it's about, but I'm still not totally convinced that it's worthwhile. So I'm going to sit on the fence for now. What I don't like is that it seems a bit pointless really. You can already store websites in your 'bookmarks' menu, or just search Google for it - quick and easy.

Maybe I feel this way because I don't visit a huge number of websites, if I had loads, then maybe I'd feel the need to have a place where I could organise them effectively. As for the benefits for libraries, I think that it could be quite good to have a page where you could direct readers to useful websites, however, we already have a page in our 24hr Library section for our part-time students called 'Useful Links' that provides this function anyway. So, not jumping up and down cheering for Delicious just yet, but not totally against it either, think I just need a bit more convincing.

Tags and Labels

Tags (known as 'labels' on Blogger) are words you can use to describe the content of a particular blog post so that you can organise your information and people can easily search through your posts. You can add a label cloud to Blogger, which shows all of the tags you have assigned. So, if people are interested in a particular topic they can just click on the tag and they will be taken to the blog posts that have been assigned that tag.

Unlike cataloguing library books, there is no right or wrong way to tagging, it is all down to personal preference. I like tagging because if you have a large amount of information (or pictures, as you can also use tags on Flickr) it enables people to find what they are interested in more easily. They are like subject headings that take you directly to a list of everything that is relevant. Quick and easy to use, they are definitely a positive thing in my book!