del.icio.us

Mmmm Mmmm, it really is delicious to use del.icio.us... I have been using this tool for quite some time to deal with a problem we face in the library system, namely that our favorites do not follow us from computer to computer. Del.icio.us solves this problem by creating a centralized place for me to store my Internet favorites so that I can pull them up on any computer I am logged onto, even away from work.

To tell the truth though, I had not really considered using del.icio.us to help me develop reading lists as is described in the web tutorial. This is an interesting feature that seems to be well suited towards those of us who need to keep up with current research on any particular topic. I was interested to hear the commentator speaking about the "magic middle" and about the need to be judicious when balancing the amount of content that can be realistically processed by any one person. I have similar feelings about the overwhelming amount of material that can be found online and also feel strongly that as information professionals we need to understand the best ways to sift through all of that info. Unfortunately, while tagging can lead you to content that you might not have reached through other means, there is also the quite real problem of false drops associated with synonymy, homonymy, and polysemy. I think that tagging has great potential to help us to better categorize and classify the vast amount of content available on the Internet, but I also think that the technology is still in its infancy and will have to undergo several growth spurts before it becomes as functional as it might be.