Del.icio.us pages are too cluttered, too busy, for me to want to spend a lot of time using the features. It would be helpful to have favorites accessible everywhere, IF you bookmark lots of sites.
Tagging is a complex issue we discussed in my grad. course on Intro. to Computers and Info. Science.
For librarians, a plus to tagging is the lack of structure, of hierarchy, means unskilled users will be relying on librarians to sift through the ever increasing amount of "stuff" to find what the user really wants.
A strong negative is that unscrupulous people can use popular tags to increase traffic to their websites. People already do crazy things to manipulate website rankings on search engines or to attract unsuspecting users to porn sites.
One of my assignments for my class was to fine-tune search engine searches to get the results below 100 hits, then analyze the results. One of these 100 hits was actually a porn site that had also scanned an encyclopedia, so Google picked up the legitimate words, but they were deliberately tricking the user to a porn site.
So, tagging is a reality, sure, but not a happy, happy, joy, joy one. It's like this scene in the Indie film Me and You and Everyone We Know, where a single father congratulates himself for using the "it takes a village to raise a child" philosophy to get his sick older son home from school without having to leave work. A co-worker asks how the younger son will get home from school now without the older one to walk him home, and dad panics and tears off to the school to pick up the younger child. The co-worker says:
"Yeah, see, this is why you don't want a village raising your kid...because there's sketchy parts of the village... and some of the villagers are junkies and child molesters."
Tagging is presented here as a really neat feature, but not everyone doing the tagging is a well intentioned, research trained librarian....
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