Thing #14

I think right now I like Delicious better than Technorati. I did the suggested searches in Technorati and was unimpressed by the results I got for each search. I feel like I can better find what I am looking for by searching Delicious for various tags. I liked the Technorati video and the thoughts that the execs expressed, but I was not helped by the actual results as much as I thought I would be. Maybe I need to poke around some more. This is making me feel a bit old as things are not as easy to figure out as I thought nor am I as intuitive as I thought I would be in figuring things out. Searching both Delicious and Technorati require a bit of a paradigm shift in thinking to come up with the better search terms. It reminds me of searching our online OPAC. If a student searches for 'cars' they don't get much. They have to know that the keyword to use is 'automobile'. After doing some searches and looking at the categories and Top Blogs, News stories, etc., I've come to the conclusion that I need to be very thoughtful in the search terms I use and it may take me awhile to get the hang of it.

I think tagging in general is very useful to me in a few different ways. One, it will help me keep my Delicious tags organized, which is something I should be good at being a librarian and all. Second, it should help me find things of greater relevance for my students and find them faster if I search by tags. I like the idea of tags but the problems, I guess you would say, come from the fact that everyone can put their own tags on themselves. Flickr pointed out that if you search for a commonly misspelled tag, you may only find half of the things that are really out there and fit what you are looking for. I also noticed that one of my tags I used singularly sometimes and plural others. I need to go back and correct this so that I can better organize things, but I have to stop and think which would be the better tag -- blog or blogs; wiki or wikis; library or libraries. I didn't think of this at first, only after I had waded in, so now I need some re-thinking! So to sum up, I think tagging is great! But it is only as good as its creators, which is everyone in the world so there are going to be some 'mistakes'.