Thing #13-Del.icio.us

While I was mostly able to understand del.icio.us from the descrption (the video link was no longer active so I couldn't watch the tutorial), it felt a little confusing when actually exploring the PLCML del.icio.us site. Clicking on their links to the favorite web sites was fine. I was able to click on the links to the people who had added it to their links and see their comments. I could follow the link to other people's favorite links. There were also tags to help sort the PLCML site. That was all pretty easy to use and self-explanatory. What would happen though is I would follow a link, leading to either another user's links, or one user's tags, and then get confused trying to get back where I started from. I could always do a "People" search and get back to where I started from, but only if I remembered where I started from! Or would it matter? *laugh out loud!* I think the more one gets familiar with it, the easier it would become.

I can defintely see the research potential of this application. People can add their favorite research sites (and libraries can do this too!) and they could also (through the social aspect nature of the tags) find even more research sites to add to their own. And of course, there is the benefit of being able to access the favorite bookmarked sites from any Internet computer and not just one desktop. Research does not normally happen only at one computer AND neither does answering reference/information questions for patrons. This way all of the computers in a library would have access to informational sites no matter what computer the librarian was using at any given desk. The tags would help arrange the subject matter to assist in this. And of course, their is the fun/hobby aspect of this application as well. This site has a similar feel to Rollyo and RSS.