23 Things Assignment #5

Hmm... another week and another social networking site that I'm not quite sure if I get. This week, we tackle Delicious (or del.icio.us), a site I'd heard a lot about but haven't explored - until now.

Delicious really has two ways of searching: by tags or by profiles (or a hybrid-combo of the two). The only time I had heard about Delicious was in reference to links/videos that had gone viral, so I assumed it was just a site where people posted "cool links" that had little real value. To evaluate Delicious, both aspects must be explored and their relevancy to public libraries examined. Starting with the broad tag search, I find it a little overwhelming. The sheer amount of information you get by putting in a simple tag (for example, "cooking" or "library") is daunting and rather useless. As an information professional, I shudder at the jumble of knowledge put forth. This just seems like a time waster - a way of saying, "Hey, what weird or interesting links can we find today?" But I found I was clicking on a lot of useless websites before I found one or two that were interesting, pretty much confirming my initial thoughts on the website.

Where I see some practical use for Delicious is in the profile section. For libraries, using Delcious as a means of conveying relevant and important links to the public and/or staff is quite feasible. Essentially, it operates in the same way as our Virtual Reference Library (except accessible to other users on Delicious), but using tags to give a picture of the link. For specific Research and Reference departments, this would be especially useful.

I find the functionality of del.icio.us to be rather annoying sometimes. If I'm looking in someone's profile and see a tag that looks interesting, clicking on the tag will only show what links that person has tagged with that word. If I want to search all of del.icio.us for that tag, it requires some extra work. Perhaps others like how this works, but it feels onerous to me. This was not the only issue I had with how Delicious works.

Personally, I probably won't be using Delicious any time soon, but I'll tuck it away in the back of my mind.