Thing 6

Having visited del.icio.us and completed the required activity, I have to say that this is the first of the "ten things" so far that I really see little if any use for. The hot bookmarks at the time I looked were all technical or computer-related, so had little value to me, but made me wonder why, for example, someone interested in Apple's new release (leppard) wouldn't go directly to the Apple site to find information or use Google or their other favorite search engine to find the information they need. In other words, isn't this just adding another step to their search? Also, I saw no discernible pattern in the way people chose to bookmark a page - entries ranged from single word tags to phrases to sentences, many of which lacked the key words one might expect for that entry. Perhaps I am too attached to the controlled vocabulary of the library cataloging world, but total randomness is entirely useless. I have similar feelings about the tag clouds on del.icio.us and other sites - most are so general as to be worthless - unless one wants to browse the entire online universe. I did add a site to the staffpicks list and was not surprised that even the sites collected under the "staffpicks" tag are entirely random and without any cohesive theme. (Of course, we were not instructed to choose a library-related site.) Obviously, I see little use for this as a tool for finding specific information, nor do I relate to the "social" aspect of it. The popularity of a site certainly doesn't guarantee its credibility. I can see del.icio.us and its counterparts as a possible means of organizing one's own favorite sites but not why it would be better than, for example, just bookmarking them on your own PC. As for library use, I'm skeptical of its effectiveness in this regard, as well. I do appreciate the attempt of the bookmarking sites to organize the web - I just don't think this is an effective means of accomplishing that.