Limits, limits, limits: have I found one?

Has anyone had trouble with a character limit in the "Notes" field of del.icio.us? For someone who loves to cut & paste large chunks of text for later, I just realized I had lost lots of chunks!

I am prepraing a conference presentation and thought, since it's on social software, I would use some of our great tools. No dice for long notes, it seems... 

Thus far, social bookmarking seems like something that would be really fun to play around with, but I can't think of a way in which I would be able to use it in my library. It would be helpful to save sites on when I am using different computers, but it seems a little complicated for my needs at this time.

This course exceeded my expectations on every level, and I am so happy to have been a part of it. I have learned so much! Reflecting on the experience has made me realize just how much information I have absorbed over the past few weeks. I could go on and on, but it wouldn't be very structured, so here are my answers to the questions posed by the 5weeks creators:

Favorite Experiences:

• Webcasts (once I got all the technology glitches worked out on my old computer - easy solution was to just buy a new one!). I particularly enjoyed the webcast on flickr given by Steve and Michael - they were so much fun!
• Weekly online chats - I really got used to the dynamic of online chatting (which I had never done before) and learned what it takes to communicate effectively in that medium.
• Variety of sources of information - podcasts, online readings, screencasts - all were effective in their own ways and got me used to using them.
• Reading other peoples blogs and profiles and meeting such great people!
• Looking at the other 5weeks members Flickr photos

Technology most useful to me:

Hi all,

This is probably old news for my news-savvy, tech-savvy colleagues in this course, but in case anyone missed it, social networking and libraries got a boost in no less than the Sunday NY Times yesterday.  Was it the Styles section or Business, i don't remember...but it put in a thumbs up for Library Thing software and talked about the community of users it has created.  I've been wanting to catalog my own collection for ages. ...Once again, just a trend follower, not the trend setter.... 

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. 

I know I'm a little late, but my chat group on Monday asked me to post some research studies and scholarly papers on tagging, and I'm quite happy to oblige. So, for your reading pleasure my friends: 

• Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata by Adam Mathes
• The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman
• Investigating Social Tagging in Art Museums with steve.museum by Jennifer Trant and Bruce Wyman
• Folksonomies: Tidying Up Tags? by Emma Tonkin  and Marieke Guy - this one got
  

I know this is week 3, but I have a week 2 question.  :)  I am using delicious to share links for a WordPress class I am teaching.  Is there a way to batch edit tags?  I know I have seen this done before... at least I am sure.  What I want to do is retag a set of bookmarks all at the same time. 

Last week was a very busy week and before I knew it the week was over before I got a chance to blog!  I am learning so much in this course.  It's exciting!  It's also going very fast.  I will be sad when it's over.  :(  

I never realized how useful RSS was until last week!  I thought it was mostly just a way to alert you to changes on a web page.  I never realized you could also use it to pull content into your web page.  What a great idea!  I know I and lots of the librarians in my system are always looking for a way to make web pages easier to update!  This will easily fit into that category.   I am currently using an rss feed to pull pics in from flickr and to pull my in my delicious links.  I have been using that for a few months now and never realized I was doing it with RSS.    I was just copying and pasting links... now it all makes a lot more sense.  :)  I am excited to try a lot of the new things I learned last week. 

Am still getting used to blogging...must admit I am feeling a little shy about posting my words for all to read. But am determined to get over this! Also just trying to get a handle on all this information we are processing each week - there are so many new words floating around in my head and I just keep trying to remind myself that someday all this new vocab won't be so new, it will just be a part of my life!

But anyways, am really excited about the possibilities of RSS and its use in the library. So many of you in the class have been posting wonderful ideas about how to use RSS feeds and I can't wait to discuss all these possibilities with my co-workers here. I have also been wondering how I can spread the word about del.icio.us and Bloglines to my students here in the library - I am so thrilled with it that I want everyone to know about it! I am thinking it would be fun to incorporate learning about these services into our instructions sessions here in the library - have students set up an account with either del.icio.us and/or bloglines and then find blogs/websites the relate to their research topic. Also have them sign up for the library blog here (which is yet to be created!). It would be cool also to have a set of links already set up for them to look at (maybe use it as a way to help them learn about good websites and bad websites). I think students could really relate to the social nature of these tools, and it would make the learning experience stick even more if they are shown tools that they can use in every aspect of their lives.

Below are a few tricks/tips I mentioned regarding del.icio.us that I mentioned to during my group chat this week.

1. You can tag items for other people using the for:username tag
2. You can bundle your tags together. Tags can be in multiple bundles
3. You can make a feed of all of your del.icio.us items
4. You can post your del.icio.us links to your blog on a daily basis

These are just a few of the features of del.icio.us If you want to know more tricks that you can do with Del.icio.us then check out Hacking Del.icio.us .