Catching up a little with 23 Things

I've been away, now I'm madly trying to catch up in the exercises.

I've had a quick look at Del.icio.us and Technorati, and the ideas behind them seem useful on a personal level but I'm still trying to get a handle on the usefullness for the wider library connectivity to patron issues.

Yes, having one place to access your bookmarked internet favourites is handy, but I'm not sure how this helps the library advertise or provide the enduser relevant information. Its an organisational tool, and if the enduser doesn't decide your site is of use to them they won't bookmark it.

As for tagging, yes now this is an old library trick of providing descriptors for an item ranging from the old Library of Congress headings we all love (not) through to those we make up on the fly for the newspapers cuttings we used to put in the vertical file drawers.

And my last point about making up tags is possibly the current downfall of Technorati, and anything else of a similar nature, it relies in a social networking kind of way, and we are talking social networking aren't we, in what you as an individual believe you and others will find the tagged item with best. This is the very argument as to why structured languages or thesauri for libraries were created, so we all had a standard way of identifying a similar item. I do understand that in recent literature this very issue has been mentioned, and ways of creating that identifiable set of strings is being looked at. Does this mean we will be going back to the creation of a thesaurus for social networking tagged items? I don;t think so, as of course you can argue that the very nature of these things being online means any term can be used as they are all searchable, and as many tags are being used to describe one entry it wil lead to other tagged entries with other different tags, and so on.

This then leads to the discovery, the serendipity aspect of social networking, or put another way the loss of time in your life aspect.