del.icio.us.ly easy

We've been using del.icio.us as a group in IS for quite some time now and I use it personally. I have to admit that although I do occasionally tag things for the IS account, I rarely use it and only then if I remember that I tagged site earlier -- I don't look to see if anyone else has added something that might be useful to what I am doing at the moment. "Doing at the moment" ... maybe that's it. I can see using it with co-workers if we had a singular mission (if we were a bunch of teachers or forensic scientists or environmentalists) and we were tagging things work-related, but we have an entire universe of topics that may come across our desks and the thought that the few of us might have tagged just the site I need to answer a particular question just doesn't occur to me. Also, the randomness of the tags always leaves me feeling that I might just be missing the right one -- what did they call it and how was it spelled?

I have found some good sites by surfing other users' tagged sites but found even single users are inconsistant in their tagging. Using children and kids for seemingly the same types of sites does not group the sites for the future -- one needs to remember what one used as a tag last time to make it useful. Merged words and underscores further muddy the puddle. It makes me yearn for some standards, some rules, some list of agreed upon tags ... oh, there I go, thinking like a librarian.

I am bored (or boring?)

So, I haven't found anything to love so far. I am bored by MySpace but maybe that's because I am boring -- I don't care to surf other people's sites and don't know many people with accounts and really, would rather email or call them if I want to contact them. Does that make me boring? Old? Of a previous generation? Or just busy? Not sure, maybe all. I do think it or something like it has potential for library use. I don't buy the arguement that kids don't like to see things like libraries on "their" turf. As the users age (that is, grow up) and new users find us already there, this will become an increasingly moot point and the expection will be that we (and everyone/thing is there). I helped a grandma find her military grandson's page that other day, so yay for this project!

Meebo might catch my fancy if I had friends who used it but we all have gmail accounts and chat there. I can see the value of using it in the library and teaching patrons to use it.

I have discarded Bloglines entirely and have gone back to my Pageflakes ways. Use it everyday.

I think it is valuable to be familiar with 2.0 trends and to have time to try them out. I'd like to see this be an ongoing program with, maybe, one new site/program/trend every month so once everyone has gone through this initial ramp-up.