my greedy enjoyment is now del.icio.us

Here is my del.icio.us account: http://delicious.com/seejanedough

- How might an individual use del.icio.us?

Personally, my bookmarks were getting terrible disorganized. I would bookmark a page, but not want to take the time to properly file it at that time. Now I have a huge mess of unsorted bookmarks. Del.icio.us seems to be a bit easier to mark at sort at the time. I will have to use it a bit more to form an opinion, though.

- What is tagging? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

I followed your resource reference to your del.icio.us article “Tagging meets subject headings.” I think an interesting point is raised in the subject heading meets tagging link.

Tagging is useful in del.icio.us for me because I can tag bookmarks with why I included them. Sometimes when I have ten minutes and need a laugh, my tag “funny” is useful to me. This does not a subject heading like “humor” could be. But usually websites, blogs, other things that I find funny just are funny and are not like an Erma Bombeck book that is written as a “humor” piece. Things I link to online are fluid and change. Tags allow me to give a bit of information that makes sense to me, but may not be as useful in a static category system.

This is where some disadvantages that I see exist. It becomes a bit less useful to outsiders who view my del.icio.us account. One of the options is about public or private access to the account. So if I let it be public, my tag of “family” is not applicable to outside viewers.

- How does del.icio.us embody the principles of the Web 2.0 philosophy?

It fits in perfectly with Wikipedia’s explanation of Web 2.0 ideals of: “facilitate(ing) communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web.” I hate to use Wikipedia, but it concisely said what I wanted. Del.icio.us allows users to share what they are doing and interacting with. Which seems to be very important in current thought, as explained in “The Machine is Us/ing Us” that you had assigned us to watch earlier this term.

And yes, I totally searched your del.icio.us to see if you had it stored there, too.