I started using Delicious a couple of weeks ago. I was initially hesitant at needing to match my tags with the tags of everyone else, so I didn’t bother, and that’s what has let me get to the power of the tool.
It’s taught me that:
- Creating tags according to what is important to me is encouraging me to bookmark items I wouldn’t have in the past (I’ve never really been a bookmark person because of the complexity involved—del.icio.us takes that away by mapping in a non-hierarchical direction.)
- It is a great way to share my readings with others on my team. Now if we’re talking about a topic which is new to them, I can simply point them at my research; which has already been collected in one place. I recently did this when explaining the benefits of RSS.
- References for a training session can be given a common tag for the participants e.g.
http://del.icio.us/quantumgardener/nctfor a session on Newfield Conversational Technology - I can branch to the tags of others when I feel inclined, but otherwise how and what others tag is of no importance to me. This is critical because I don’t have to filter through people’s different understandings of use of a single word unless I have the time. That said, I may take up some of the practices in a recent Denham Grey article on Using Social Bookmarks
- Using as many tags as possible to describe each item makes me think about its importance and makes for a richer retrieval experience