Task 13-Social Bookmarking and Del.icio.us

Yet another great social networking tool. I bookmarked the homepage of LibraryThing and found it has been saved by 12033 other people when I researched it on the Del.icio.us site. I bookmarked the Casa Romantica Reading Series (from the link under Links to Poetry Resources) and found no one had bookmarked it. Maybe someone will discover it if they look at my bookmarks. I bookmarked About.com : Poetry and found 9 other people who had marked it. I looked at the bookmarks of one of those people, clicking on the poetry tag, and followed one of the links to a page full of Library of Congress blogs; one of which was a blog about upcoming poetry events. I used the RSS feed to insert it under Poetry Events from Library of Congress.

I did experience the shortcomings user defined tags. I was looking at the bookmarks of another person who had tagged About.com : Poetry and found it difficult to locate other poetry tags in the cloud; tags are assembled without hierarchical structure. It helped a little to sort by alphabetical list--finding tags that started with the word "poetry,"--but that did not help me to find the tag "sound_poetry." I also got different bookmarks for "poetry_reading" and "poetry_readings." You can tell if you are using a tag that is not one likely to be used for your subject by the community if no one else has selected it (if your subject is not too specialized). I chose the tag "live_poetry" as a possibility for poetry readings and found no one else has used it. I'm going to delete it. The following article addresses the shortcomings of folksonomy. Even with its shortcomings, this system of classification offers some semantic intelligence in searching: something that search engines lack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy#Folksonomy_and_top-down_taxonomies