It's not delivery, it's Delicious...

This week we were asked to register for an account with "Delicious," which is an online social bookmarking service. Just like bookmarking on a private computer, Delicious allows users to label or "tag" a website according to their own needs. Tags added to each link then become searchable for other users, allowing them to find their way to your "favourite" sites. The added benefit of Delicious is that you can access your web-bookmarks from any computer, anywhere; whereas, regular bookmarks are limited to your specific computer.

This social bookmarking tool is an exercise in collaborative subject cataloguing. Regular users (to my knowledge) are not aware of their significant impact on the organization and classification of resources on the internet, yet they play such a large role in it. The question of controlled versus uncontrolled vocabulary is the central dilemma. Alireza Noruzi's article, "Folksonomies: (Un)Controlled Vocabulary?," published in 2006, discusses the limitations of uncontrolled vocabularies in the clear classification of knowledge. By decentralizing subject cataloguing, on the one hand, we are losing accuracy and consistency in classification; yet, on the other hand, we are potentially gaining increased access to information according to simplified and popularized terms. Noruzi's article is a bit out-of-date, in my opinion, because many of the suggestions, such as recommendable tags, have already been implemented in updated versions of social bookmarking tools like Delicious. Thus, there is a verifiable effort being made to work towards creating a more consistent vocabulary for classification in social contexts.

Personally, I did not find Delicious to be that scrumptious. I entered my typical search term, squash (my favourite sport), and immediately Delicious brought back results for butternut squash soup, or roasted spaghetti squash. I looked at the "related tags" list, and everything had to do with cooking or vegetables; nothing hinted towards the sport called squash. So, I had to change my search to "squash sport," and then only 918 links showed up. From years of researching squash on the internet, I know that there are far more websites regarding squash (the sport) than that. Therefore, I have not been too impressed with this social bookmarking site; however, conversely, every tool has its advantages, disadvantages, and limitations.

Furthermore, perhaps collaborative subject cataloguing could be useful within very specific communities, such as in elementary or middle school communities. Often younger students will have different terms or phrases to describe a subject or topic than the teachers or librarians at a school. Thus, by allowing students to contribute to the classification and curation of these high-interest resources, this may result in more students locating and gaining access to these resources.