still thinking about RSS and del.icio.us

Learning about del.icio.us was one of the most important aspects of this class for me. And watching Jason Griffey's webcast  (Make Your Library del.icio.us) just brought it home even more. I have already posted a blog about how RSS has changed my life forever, but every day I am reminded about how cool RSS really is and how incredibly useful tools like del.icio.us can be for libraries. One of the first points Jason made was that del.icio.us was FAST & EASY - and this is a huge selling point for both patrons and other librarians and administrators. Tying it in with what we learned about selling social software, Jason's webcast gives lots and lots of ways to sell this social software tool. You can share bookmarks, you can create pathfinders, you can create RSS feeds for specific classes - this is a tool that is good for the workplace, for the library and for personal use. The only thing I have found difficult to get used to, and which Jason talks about in depth, is tagging. He mentions the "wisdom of crowds" and says that "out of the largess of words eventually there will be usefulness created" - but honestly, when I am putting tags onto my links I am sometimes not so sure about my own wisdom - I think that sometimes tags are just too personal (Jason mentions this as a negative aspect of folksonomies - the locality of some tags makes them completely un-useful) - I am not a cataloger, so I don't have to struggle with the idea of there be no controlled vocabulary, but I sometimes find it difficult to think of tags, or get hung up on finding just the right terms. Thank goodness that del.icio.us gives you hints based on what others have tagged! As I mentioned in my RSS blog, I plan on introducing del.icio.us and bloglines to my students and perhaps even getting professors interested in the idea of a class feed - I just think it would make research so much easier and more effective and more collaborative!