Week 7: Social Bookmarking & Tagging

This week's readings have helped clarify how bookmarking and tagging can be social. Knowing that del.icio.us tags are available to all users and understanding how that becomes social software is quite different. The idea that in tagging personal information people may unknowingly contribute to some kind of global folksonomy is fascinating.  I like the idea that social tagging and more controlled classification methods are complementary and can work together to minimize each other's weaknesses. In The Del.icio.us Lesson, Porter suggests that most people tag for their own retrieval purposes rather than to make content more findable by others. Regardless, as more and more people become proficient at assigning labels and navigating other people's social bookmarks, the complexity and usefulness of user defined tags should develop accordingly. Adopting new technology and evolving it to new levels can be a slow process and I will be interested to see how social bookmarking and tagging evolves as people become more aware of its potential.  

On reviewing this week's case studies, I was surprised both at how the social tagging on some sites integrated seamlessly and how on others very little attempt was made to organize the links usefully. The PennTags website content was difficult to read and browse and the tag cloud was not an effective substitute for some kind of order, but I did appreciate that the site defined what they considered a "popular tag." Lupton Library offers the ability to save their links in PDF format or to print them, but the resulting document was empty. The Seldovia Public Library's list of tags with usage statistics is an interesting approach to navigation, but there is still room for improvement with all of these case studies.