Thing #10: Tagging and Folksonomies

So Thing #10 takes us to delicious. I was a little surprised as I thought it had been announced that delicious was being withdrawn last year. Well, I was correct in as much as this had been wodiely reported, but it turned out yahoo were selling the service, not shutting it down. So that's ok. Onwards we go...

I used delicious before, when it has lots of punctuation in its name, as one of my first forays in web 2.0. However I have forgotten which email account I used and so find I have to sign up afresh. I am an obsessive bookmarker, and haul the same set of bookmarks around from computer to computer, always backing up the export file at least once a month, so you'd think something like this would be ideal for me.

I start by uploading said html export file, which it does very easily. And then it says it's had an error and can't display my bookmarks. And then it finds them again. the panic I feel, even knowing they're safely stored on my PC anyway, reminds me that this isn't a service I can use as a back-up, because I have no control over it.

I also discover that I've somehow set all my bookmarks to private on uploading them. Luckily I manage to use the bulk edit funcation to change this, 100 at a time.

The challenge instructs us to contribute some links and tags of our own to delicious. As I am an archivist, all my bookmarks were stored in a hierarchical folder structure anyway, and the names of these folders have appeared as tags against the relevant bookmarks. They're not very revealing though ('sewing' 'cats' 'new york' etc). For the sake of this task, I concentrate on the bookmarks in my archives folder. I instantly struggle with making two word tags (flickr uses quotation marks, delicious seems to use underscores). Some of the links I have to look up to find out what interested me on the page (such as this from the Times Higher Ee, which turns out to be regarding the National Fairground Archive).

Archival theory insists on each item being assigned one place in the hierarchy so tagging starts to feel almost anarchistic to me. For example, I have the International Jazz and Popular Music Archives in Eisenach in the category of Archives in my bookmarks. I also have separate folders for Jazz and German and Germany, which cover respectively - albums I might like to buy, german language resources and travel information. To contribute effectively to delicious, this link needs to be tagged with all of those, but it will actually confuse my own use of the links if I tag it as, says, german, and it then pops up when I'm searching my links to help with my homework. Yes it is to do with all those things, but not for me.

One way of recreating my insane mildly obsessive folder structure within delicious would be to use the bundle feature. This allows me to take groups of tags and make them into 'bundle' with a new name. Effectively, ensuring that all links that are now or ever will be tagged with those words would appear in the über-tag/bundle. I can certainly see the benefits of this in adding future links, although all my imported links already have the folder names in their tags so they don't need it.

The other element of delicious that was highlighted under Thing #10 was its social aspect i.e. seeing who else has bookmarked what you have bookmarked, and then looking through their links. It was this side of delicious that I explored before after attending a workshop on web 2.0 as it enables you to see who has bookmarked your site and how they have tagged it. (Disappointingly, no-one on delicious has bookmarked the University of Westminster Archives homepage). I looked at some of the people who had tagged some of the same professional websites as me though, and then followed through some of their links tagged 'archives' and it certainly is a useful resource in terms of finding new blogs and articles to read. Oh for more time to do so!

Verdict on delicious then: doesn't arrange my bookmarks the way I would like them, but useful for exploring other people's links.


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