Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Thing 12. Social Media Sites

OK. I am not familiar with these and I have little time to use them. I keep reminding myself that it's OK to set boundaries when learning and working with Web 2.0 tools. Anyway, I have seen links to Digg and other similar tools. These look like interesting ways for libraries to create current awareness or news pages. That's about all I have to say, I am not going to blog much more since I have many more "Things" to conquer. Onward!

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Thing 11. Tagging & Social Bookmarking

I find it interesting that these two things were grouped together. Yes, they compliment one another, but there potential uses can be different. Social bookmarking, this is something that I am aware about, but have not used personally. I know a lot of librarians who are heavy users of social bookmarking. For me, I rely on my bookmarks for purely professional reasons and I have them set up on my iGoogle page so I can access them where I want. I love the idea of sharing your bookmarks and discovering information from your peers, but for me I just don't have the time to do this.
Tagging, I am becoming a HUGE fan of tagging. As I have mentioned in previous posts I am a strong believer in the knowledge of the masses and find it interesting to see how tagging plays into this. I know there are many people out there who get concerned about tagging and the fact that it's an uncontrolled vocabulary. I see tagging as a way for users to enhance controlled vocabulary and it provides them an opportunity to participate in the library's organization of information. In my work I see tagging as a tool that I need to utilize to improve user access to information.