New Things for an old dog

I fear this blog has had an attack of Fifth Week Sag (that mid-term wilting feeling, when it seems that term has been going on far too long but the end is nowhere near being in sight yet). I spent last week jotting random notes of my thoughts about deli.cio.us, but never got my head round putting them together into a coherent post. It's now well into Sixth Week, so, lest I should be disappointing my legions of adoring fans ;), here are some rambling rantings:

I think I have been around computers too long. Several of these Web 2.0 things are solutions to problems to which I worked out my own solutions years ago. I'm used to my own solutions; they work for me -- I don't personally find any advantage in the Web 2.0 solution. Many, many years ago, when the internet was in its infancy, I solved the problem of my bookmarks not being accessible from any computer I happened to be using by writing a webpage of links to all the things I used most often, and links to other pages where I collected links I used less often. Over the years, as what I found useful disappeared, changed, or was added to, I updated the pages. They all sit in my University webspace, and all I need in order to be able to alter them is an ftp programme, a basic text editor like Notepad, and to remember a few basic HTML tags. Last summer, having come across this "Web 2.0" expression and investigated what it was all about, I thought I'd try bookmarking things on delicious instead. But I didn't get very far with it. For a start, I couldn't download the "bookmarklet" -- probably due to restrictions put on my computer by the College's IT department, who seem to have very definite ideas about what constitutes work and might well have jibbed at being asked to set me up with something called a "social bookmarking service" -- so solved the problem of adding a bookmark quickly to delicious by -- adding the delicious "Save a new bookmark" page to my IE Favorites! One of the things I often save links to is second-hand bookshops and search sites -- but couldn't remember whether I'd tagged them "second-hand" or "2nd-hand", "booksearch" or "search" (yes, I know there's an "autocomplete" function, which will fill in a previously-used tag for you, but you have to remember how your tag started). I also tried investigating what other people were tagging which might be useful for antiquarian cataloguing, so I tried "rare books", "antiquarian books", "early printed books" -- maybe I'm too much of a librarian, but one thing that bugs me about "tags" is the lack of authority control! Such links as I found were sometimes to webpages which no longer existed, and often to things I knew already or didn't find very useful. Google is so brilliant at finding things that I'd rather type search terms in there than try to guess what tags other people might have assigned to things -- and using Google I can quite often find things again even if I haven't bookmarked them. If I find something I want to share with friends or colleagues, I just email them a link. And tags tend to be very general -- you may end up with too many things tagged the same to be useful.

There is also the problem which applies to the World Wide Web in general -- the reliability of the data. How do I know that someone who has tagged this webpage as A Good Thing has the expertise to tell whether it is A Good Thing or not? This is where I can see having a library contributing to delicious could be useful -- one would hope library staff would be as careful in their choice of bookmarks as they are in their choice of books (although you don't have to pay out money for the former!). But a lot of libraries already have a "Useful links" page on their websites. Having your own page of links means that you can control how it looks, organize them into groups and rank them hierarchically. It may be easier to bookmark something on delicious than to add it to a webpage, but it may also mean one is less discriminating!

These are only preliminary reactions to delicious. Looking at what needs to be done for Thing 10, and at other people's experience of delicious, I'm sure there are a lot of benefits to it, and if I had plenty of time to play around with it and explore I'd find them. But I don't at present. So I think I'd better move on to someThing else.