Thing #14: Technorati and How Tags Work

After exploring this Thing and the last one, I've come to realize just how important and beneficial tagging can be. But it's fascinating that the same principle works in different ways; that is, in Delicious the users tag the content, helping them save and categorize sites they want to remember . However, in Technorati, that function belongs to the publishers or creators of their own blogs to help them get their message out to a larger number of people. So I guess a person would choose one or the other of these (Delicious or Technorati) depending on their needs and perspective. Both could be useful for research. In my school situation, we would probably use Delicious more so that the students could recall the sites they had found previously and might want to use again.

When I searched the blogosphere for posts, I got 121 results with the term "School Library Learning 2.0". Changing to search for blogs, there were 21 results, and by limiting the results to tags only, I ended up with 28 (most of which were from our Library2Play blog).

Thing #13: Tagging and Discover Delicious

I am definitely on information overload status now. So much to see and do with these social bookmarking sites! I already had an account on Delicious, set up primarily to archive my bookmarks and make them available from school or home. I also didn't want to lose them in case of a computer crash. I had no idea about all the other capabilities of this tool. I like the tagging feature because often a website needs to be bookmarked in two or more folders, creating a lot of duplication. With tags, it is saved once but recalled with any of its assigned tags. In looking around in some of these sites, I discovered how easy it is to find other information on a topic of interest to me. I also like the capability in Furl (or Diigo now, as it appears to be called) of adding highlights or sticky notes for later reference. Maybe that is possible in Delicious too but I haven't found it yet.

As for school use, I would be interested to know how others use these tools. I can see their benefits as far as research is concerned, but many of these types of sites are filtered in our districts and students are not allowed access (I don't know about these particular sites because I have not yet tried them at school). Also, our teachers usually require students to use subscription databases rather than (or sometimes in addition to) internet for their research.