Sunday, December 5, 2010

Thing 10

Ugh. Del.icio.us.

I first tried de.licio.us last year during a Library 2.0 workshop, and while I was at first impressed with it, I soon found it time-consuming and confusing. I guess what it boils down to is that I'm not a fan of tags because for me, it's one of those "once I start, where do I stop?" kinds of things. How few tags are too few and how many are too many? And do I really and truly need to use every possible term I can think of to tag webpages? Well, yes, I must, because it could happen that six months or a year down the road, I might not remember some of the terms that were important to me when I first tagged something, so will I be able to retrieve it? Maybe not. Overall, while the concept is nice, for someone like me, the use of de.licio.us is just plain frustrating.

I suppose it would certainly come in handy for finding (or sharing) webpages in the workplace. If you have a few people who repeatedly use the same sites for storytime ideas and themes, fingerplays and feltboards, or suggested and recommended books, for instance, having them tagged as such would helpful and would make them quick to find. Or pages concerning budgets, library news, intellectual freedom, etc., etc.

But I just think tagging is overwhelming. Not to mention, we've tagged our blog posts for our YS blog at work, and the tags just spill down the side of the page. Is it really necessary to tag a "meet the YS staff" blog post with the name of the staff member the post is highlighting? Probably not, especially if there will be no future posts featuring that person. With a department of 7, like mine, you now have 7 tags just hanging onto the side of the page, filling up space. It would make more sense to tag them with the term "interview" or "staff" or something where they could go under a general subject heading. There, all 7 are now contained under one tag. Simpler? Yes. But still time consuming, because you have to think about all these things first. And, for something like a blog, too many tags on the side of the page makes for a lot of scrolling and reading to find something that might be of interest.

So there are my thoughts on de.licio.us and tags.

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