Thing 13 Tagging

I've been using del.icio.us for a little more than a year. As with some other things, this began because my hard drive had crashed and I had lost a long list of bookmarks. Fortunately enough, it's now easy to remember a lot of web addresses (remember back when all Internet addresses were number?), so I don't bookmark as much as I used to.

Now, though, del.icio.us is the only way I save links: it's safe from crashes (or theft--a cartoonist friend just had his laptop and 2 backup hard drives stolen), it's easy to access from another computer, it allows viewing of other people's tags.

I can think back to who we had our books arranged when I was managing telephone reference (we had our own shelving method, with sections like "who" (biographical sources), "where" (geographical sources), "words" (dictionaries), "quotes" (self-evident), and so on. With del.icio.us, we could have tagged websites with the matching section name, which would have been very helpful.

And, of course, for the Dewey lovers among us, it's easy to use DDC for tags. While that might not be so interesting for customers, it could be a simple way for librarians to organize links.