Week 7: Tagging, Technorati and del.icio.us

I have to admit I kind of raced through this one (maybe spent 45 minutes). As someone who did their degree in the last 10 years, I am quite familiar with the concept of tagging and metadata etc. I can understand it's uses and actually think the library catalogue receiving feeds from LibraryThing is quite a good development (from a Readers Advisory perspective). Yes, AquaBrowser (and other products/resources) might be more spectacular, but I find the ability to let library patrons do their own 'if you liked this, try this' quite helpful (and they usually think it's pretty good too) - most especially because it's only linking off to other items in the library catalogue (I think our collection is big enough to do this - smaller libraries and library services might not be well-served by this).

I could go on with del.icio.us but I've never found it personally helpful and really struggled with my browser over this (n.b. I will try the next weeks activities with FireFox - like I think I should've already been doing). I'm also not one for tagging (but I'll try to tag this) - possibly pretty shameful for a librarian/information manager but I'm being honest. I also struggled with Technorati but only because it seemed pretty unspectacular to me (and when I have a reaction like that I always wonder if it's because I failed to grasp/see the concept). This is why it would've been good to participate in Learning 2.0 as a group, rather than as a lone librarian on a friday afternoon (when I think I should be out weeding the 920's), but it just didn't work out that way. Maybe for Learning 4.12...