Thing 13: Social Bookmarking & Tagging

Is tagging a useful way to organize your digital resources and why?
Yes, for sure. There have been so many times I have lost all my "Favorites" ..it is very frustrating. II like how through Delicious you can access your tagged sites from any computer. Often I will add sites on my home computer and then will have a hard time finding the same site when I am at school.

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages?
Tools such as social bookmarking have made it easy for Web users to not only have a way of remembering a favorite Web page or website in order to reduce the time spent on searching for them, but also to share these bookmarked Web pages and websites to other Internet users in a collaborative fashion.
As a community of educators the advantage would be to share sites with colleagues. I feel there are so many websites that each individual teacher have saved as their"Favorites" this allows you to create a pool of such websites which if tagged right can be a very good resource. There is a way to import all your present bookmarks into delicious and that might give you a very good start. A second advantage is that you could access the information from anywhere.
DISADVANTAGE:One draw back with this tag-based system is that there are no standards set for the keywords, controlled terms and vocabulary used. This can create a problem, especially since the tag-based system relies on people, and not on any program created in the Internet. Since the people are the ones organizing the tags, there are chances of creating an inconsistent standard and management system for tags. People who create the tags just create them according to their own accord, creating confusion with the other users who rely on the tags to find what they are looking for in these social bookmarking websites.

The lack of standards for tag structures, such as capitalization, singular vs. plural, as well as other similar issues, in social bookmarking makes it susceptible to mistagging. This can be caused by misspelling certain words, by tagging certain subjects using keywords that have two or more meanings, by tagging websites and/or Web pages with unclear tags caused by synonym-antonym confusion, or by using too "personalized" tags that other users will not be able to understand or decipher what the tag is about.


What is important to think about before assigning tags to bookmarks or other Internet content?
I think it is important for you to remember that this information can be shared with others, so you need to be careful what sites you tag. It is also important that you give it a tag that relates well to the bookmarked site so that you and others are able to find it in your tags.