Del.icio.us and tagging.

I've been using del.icio.us for about a year now and tagging for something on the range of two or three years. I love them both.

I'll start with del.icio.us. It's very useful for a number of reasons, first, I get all sorts of links sent to me via email, or shared with me at work or on messenger. Frequently I either don't have the time to explore them fully, or I know that they'll be useful to me in the future. If I bookmark the site, then I can only access it from the computer I was at at the moment I looked at it. I have two computers myself and there are six in my home. If I want to share the link with anyone else, I either have to bring them to my computer or I have to remember the site. With del.icio.us, I simply click and tag the site and move on.

Del.icio.us is also much easier to categorize, sort, and clean out than bookmarks are. I can spend hours trying to clean out my bookmarks because I have to click on nearly every site to see what it is and why I saved it. In del.icio.us, I tag (or index) it with keywords that make sense to me. Then, when I want to clean it up I already know what type of site I'm looking at and that can save me all sorts of time.

Del.icio.us is very useful in research. I know that when I'm researching something I may come across all sorts of websites full of related information. Later, sometimes months later, I may realize that information is now relevant but I won't remember which site it was on, where I found it or how to find it again (a major problem for some of our graduate students).

With del.icio.us, I can quickly and efficiently save and tag all the sites I visit when I'm beginning my research. Even if I'm not sure I'll need them, I can tag with the topic, i.e. two-spirit, and then later when I realize something that I read months ago is now important to the altered focus of my research, I can simply go through everything I tagged "two-spirit" in my del.icio.us. In fact, I could take all those sites I'd tagged, drop them into a rollyo search roll and then search them all for the information that I'm looking for. It's way more useful and time-effective to do that than it is to go back to google and start trying to find all the sites that deal with the topic of being two-spirit and weed through those that are useful or academically acceptable all over again.

Tags are a wonderful personal indexing tool and something that I rely on every day. For example, suppose I frequently post links to interesting sites in my blog for my friends to explore. Now say it's several months later and I need to revisit one of those sites and I don't remember which one it is. If I'm continually tagging all link-related blog entries with the word "links," I can quickly click that tag and my blog will pull up everything that I've tagged with that word. In just a couple of moments I can find the link and be back on my way. Tagging is literally creating a personal index. It's a marvelous tool and it can be as complicated or simple as you'd like it to be. The one caveat with tagging is that, like in the library, you need to be consistent with the way you tag things or it's not going to be useful to you. :D