Belated Thoughts on RSS & Social Bookmarking

I have been using RSS feeds for a while to keep up with blogs I like to follow.  But it was really fun to play more with the organizational features.  I also hope to advertise a little more to our faculty some of the uses of RSS to replace things like our old table of contents delivery service. 

Social bookmarking was harder for me to get my head around.  At first it just seemed like one more favorites page.  I did like the idea of having your favorites available from whatever computer or location I might have to be.  As I have played with it more however, I am coming to see that this really organizes so much better.  Instead of creating multiple folders, etc. to keep things in, I can add as many descriptors as I want and then at the point of need pull a list based on my descriptors – or combinations thereof!  A dynamic organization system.  Even as an old cataloger I can’t help but love that.  I expect I will find this more and more useful as I get used to using it. 

Just my two cents on the controlled vocabulary vs. folksonomies thing.  All of the postings on the subject have made for interesting reading.  The thing is that these are complimentary ways of organizing information.  Not competitive.  And I especially appreciated the posting that pointed out that each of us really has / will have our own “controlled vocabulary” in the bookmarks if want to be able to use them in an organized fashion.