Sunday, October 18, 2009

Week 6, Thing #13, Del.icio.us

Taking a look at SJLibraryLearning2's bookmarks on Del.icio.us, I discovered an interesting article about England considering the idea of libraries selling books. When I took a look at the different websites that are tagged storytelling I found an interesting website VoiceThread (voicethread.com). You can add your own voice to pictures, documents, and videos. One of the pictures I looked at was a drawing made by a child. The child describes his picture. Then people leave comments about the drawing by different ways including text or voice. On Del.icio.us I also looked at the tag cloud for popular bookmarks. One tag that was interesting was wishlist. Out of curiosity I looked at some of the bookmarks and found out that some of the things people were putting on their wishlists were a PS3, artwork, shoes, or handbags. Another tag that caught my eye was YouTube where people marked videos from http://www.youtube.com/. Related tags are helpful. For instance with the tag food you can then search for bookmarks that are tagged with food and the additional tag of recipes, baking, or nutrition to name a few of the eleven different tags suggested by Del.icio.us. I took a look at the tag education. I can see where some people added a comment to explain what the bookmarked site was about. I could also easily see the other tags the user chose for that bookmark. The related tags feature is very useful. I chose the additional tag games which gave me a list of bookmarks about educational games. It looks like some games are free online games, some games are to purchase, and some activities are printable worksheests. There are 79,175 bookmarks with the tags education and games! Del.icio.us could be useful in research. By searching on a tag that you think would result in relevant bookmarks, you can then have in front of you a list of websites that someone else has deemed relevant for the subject you are looking up. As long as you remember to look at the websites critically to determine the validity of the information, then you should be ok using del.ici.ous as a method for finding relevant websites. If you are looking at one person's or one organization's bookmarks on a particular subject, you may feel comfortable trusting the information on the websites if you trust the person or organization to look over the website before including it in their list of bookmarks. Libraries could use del.icio.us as a way to bookmark sites about particular subjects that patrons are interested in. Then it would be easy to refer patrons to the library's del.icio.us bookmarks instead of having to mention all of the individual sites.

2 comments:

  1. one could do an interesting content analysis of delicious. Want to do VoiceThread as your web 2.0 innovation presentation?

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  2. I was actually trying to decide between storybird.com and VoiceThread as my web 2.0 innovation presentation. I chose storybird.com but since I posted it on the discussion board, Kirsten has posted on the class wiki that she was doing digital storytelling which might be too similiar to storybird.com.

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