confessions of a southside catatonic chataholic

Whoa! That's my first comment regarding my impression of del.icio.us - There's so much there to look at. And, as usual, I spent ages exploring, trying to take it all in and generally being nosey. Will no doubt be back for another look.

I decided to create myself a del.icio.us account and save my own bookmarks etc. Waltzing Matilda said she had a hard time trying to get in so I thought oohh boy I'll just bypass all of that and create my own account. You can even view my bookmarks if you want. Yeah, there's only 4 (so sue me) but I couldn't help myself and spent a bit of time going through the items found on the PLCMCL2 link to get a fair impression of how this could be utilised in Manukau Libraries. Still trying to get my head round it.

The idea of 'tags' seems easy enough, I mean some of us choose to utilise that already right here in blogger with the labels we can add to our posts. It's not that much different from that, right? Although hmm I could put any old stinky label for this post, eh. In fact, I could have 'smelly socks' as a label - I might just test that. So check my labels for 'smelly socks'. Free-form keywords! So desu ka! I quickly published this post and then clicked on my label to see if there was anyone else with 'smelly socks'. Apparently not. Go figure.

Our tutorial discovery resources for this activity states that the real power of del.icio.us is in the social network aspect - it allows users to see other people's tags and check out other links/websites of interest. OMG that's my kinda internet fun - just generally cruising for whatever sparks a flicker of interest.

Chose two bookmarks to view the tags for, one saved by lots of users, and then one saved by only a few. I wanted to get an idea of how people tag the info and if it differed from large groups of users and small groups of users. Then I clicked on some of the user names and had a look at what they'd saved/bookmarked and quite happily wasted lots of time exploring their stuff. I'm easily distracted and everything catches my interest.

I do think, though, that the layout is so UGLY looking. So - so - functional! And yes, I freely admit I'm shallow. Is funny but now I'm quite conscious, when playing online, of things like wiki, blogs and tags. Was playing around and followed some link to Propeller which is a social news portal programmed by *gulps* its users. If that sounds confusing, and to me it did at first, check out their FAQs and have a nosey. Basically, it's a news site and we - the general public - submit the news and it's 'monitored' by 'anchors' who get rid of spam and clean up the stories a bit before posting 'em. Anyone can view the stories but only registered users can leave comments. I digress - as usual. All the stories here have tags. Wonderful tags! So you can go from a story about 'border security' and end up in one about 'Canada' and then another about 'taxes'. Cool - but scary!

Ha! Also added a del.icio.us badge to the left - just 'cause I can - so check it
out, homes!

Have added a pic of Fonzie (from Happy Days as played by Henry Winkler) because I remember a time (I was like 5 ok? you can't hold that against me!) when I thought he was so cool. But OMG check out the sideburns. Geez louise! Oh and remember to click on my 'smelly socks' label just 'cause you can.