Excercise 5 or The Tagging Process

To be perfectly honest, before working on this assignment I did not do a whole lot when it came to delicious. All that I did with delicious is find some web page that discussed what someone had to say about the topic and then add it to my list of topics. I was not sure of the long term value of bookmarking these pages. After working with all of the capabilities of delicious it has transformed my view of the nature of the social networking bookmarks and why it can be useful.

The usefulness of the bookmarking comes in where it comes to the connections with other people. I can see what everyone else is thinking when they are talking about another topic online. If I tag something tagged, I will know how many other people used that word tagged to tag something. I can also find the websites that those other people find interesting, or I can find the websites that they find interesting about the use of the word tagged. The searches can be endless. And you kind of get to know someone else's thought process as a result.

Despite the usefulness of such a tool, I do have to also say that there are some limitations to the whole idea. While I can find what other sites there are on the word tagged, or what someone else may be thinking about when they think the word tagged, I have learned through this and through Cataloging that coming up with a consistent term is the only way of being able to find anything when you are classifying. For example, I may look up tagging and thing that I am going to find all of the instances where someone is noting a word in a social tagging site. However, I know that others have used the term to mean someone who spray paints their insignia on a freeway or cable car or other item to denote that they have been there. I may look up tagging but its only as useful as however many others have the same idea about what the word tagged means. This does not even include what other English speaking countries may mean when they tag one word that has multiple meanings in the two different countries.

Tagging, I have discovered, can be a beautiful thing. Tagging has its limits.