I have really enjoyed using social tagging since I learned about it about a year and a half ago. Not only has it been a useful tool to help me keep track of personal information, it’s helped me better share it with my friends and colleagues. Simply being able to access my bookmarks anywhere is exciting enough in itself, but tagging has made my life so much easier. I used to only bookmark things very judiciously because I didn’t want to crowd my browser’s bookmark area. As a result, I didn’t bookmark things that I would’ve liked to and couldn’t find things later after discovering they were the very services or information that a friend needed, because I couldn’t find them again with a search engine.
I’ve also been using del.icio.us as a discovery tool, both as a search engine and for social discovery. I have a network in del.icio.us of friends and colleagues, and they are always bookmarking things that are relevant to me, so I follow the RSS feed of my network in my feed reader. I also search del.icio.us like a regular search engine. People bookmark things that are useful or interesting and tag the with relevant tags, so the results you get from del.icio.us are a lot neater than from a regular search engine. The power of folksonomy is great. While our carefully organized and classified information is an incredible resource, it’s just not possible to apply that power to the internet. Tagging has given us some semblance of order and selection in the chaotic mass of information available out there now.
In a research setting, social tagging sites create great tools for discovering, organizing, recalling, and sharing information.
