Week Four - Del.icio.us

If I knew of something like Del.icio.us when I was still in school, I would've used it. When I worked on projects and was using a school computer, I would copy and paste each URL I needed onto an email and send it to myself. It was a huge hassle and it got confusing. With social bookmarking, you can search directly from the site for relevent articles, tag them, make notes on it, put a label on it, and organize it all. It's so efficient. So it's definitely a great tool to use for research, especially when you're working on multiple projects at once.

Since I'm not in school anymore, yes, it's still useful as a bookmarking site. I pretty much go to the same websites all the time and memorize their URLs, but through tagging I can "favorite" specific pages or articles that are important. It makes your favorite sites easily accessible from everywhere and I like the convenience factor.

Public tags can be useful but it can also be time-consuming going through other people's tags and you never know when you'll find something useful. It might help when doing research. I'll try it again and see later.

I'll keep my del.icio.us account to keep random pages I want to remember. But I'm so used to just copy/pasting URLs onto emails and sending them to myself. Those buttons I installed onto the tool bar are pretty helpful though...

As for the library, I think it could use bookmarking sites somehow. I'm always thinking about how these tools can help connect the library with patrons...in this case, I'm not sure del.icio.us would be of much use for that. But I think the library should at least let patrons know about social bookmarking and its capabilities, especially students. Flyers would be good, or even better, there could be a little auditorium event to teach people about it. Or make a series of events that go through each Web 2.0 thing. I don't know if that's realistic or not though.