Del.icio.us and Tagging

I think that social bookmarking sites are a clever idea for people who access the internet on more than one computer to be able to keep track of their favourite websites. Del.icio.us seems an ideal way for people to do this.

There were a couple of things about Del.icio.us that I think could be improved however. I think more search options would be helpful (there were search tips but they were buried in the help pages) and more options for sorting results. It would be useful to be able to sort search results by most saved bookmarks. I was unable to find a way to do this. Its helpful to see the most recent bookmarks but I would also have liked to be able to see the most saved. There may be a really useful site out there but its frustrating if you have to scroll through 20 pages of results to find it.

I think it would be helpful to use the Library's list of bookmarks when looking for information for our customers. Perhaps having a link to the Library's bookmarks on the staff resources page would be useful.

I have to say after exploring Flickr and Del.icio.us I am not too keen on the idea of tagging. One thing I found really frustrating with tagging is users tagging items with words that have nothing to do with the website, picture, video etc. that is being posted. I found this happening a lot on Flickr. For example I did a search for pictures with Frangipanis in the tags and got pictures back with no frangipanis in sight. Searching on Flickr can result in thousands of pictures and you don't need to be getting pictures that have nothing to do with what you are interested in. I think searching using tags isn't always efficient as sometimes the tags don't really reflect the item they are supposed to be associated with.