Having fallen behind in recent weeks, I’ve done a blitz of the Week 2 and 3 materials. So…where to begin? RSS has always been a bit of a mystery up to this point, and, to be honest, I hadn’t been too keen to explore what it meant because a) no one I knew had really raved on and on about it (this as opposed to, say, Facebook) and b) I was put off by the name: ‘RSS’? (I’m allergic to acronyms.) When I started to read what RSS was actually all about, though, I soon discovered that it was really handy. One of the problems with the Web is that there’s so much out there and it’s difficult to keep track of the ‘highlights’ of sites that are handy or personal favourites. Something like Google Reader, though, makes this process really easy.
I’ve set up feeds from a number of my most-visited sites (The Onion, Arts and Letters Daily, Smashing Telly – which is a great place to find interesting/obscure videos online, if you haven’t heard of it), and now I just sit back and let the ‘goodies’ roll in. Brilliant! I haven’t had the chance to set up a personalised homepage yet, but judging by Rebecca White’s devotion to iGoogle (she’s doubtless feeding the virtual fish in the virtual aquarium on her iGoogle page right now), I think I should at least have a look.
I’m slightly more dubious about the Week 3 topic of social bookmarking. While I’ve used Flickr and think it’s quite useful for sharing digital photos, as a librarian I just can’t see how the whole idea of ‘folksonomies’ will ever really, satisfactorily work on a grand scale. Surely rules, constraints and (dare I say it) limitations are essential to accurately describe the depth and breadth of what’s ‘out there’. Aren’t folksonomies just the first step to descriptive chaos? Or am I being uptight? Comments are welcome…
Hi Andrew,
Glad to hear you’ve had a chance to look through the content on RSS and social bookmarking.
I agree with you – RSS is really handy. I have quite a few feeds I keep an eye on. Like Rebecca I use a personalised homepage to read my feeds, but I use Pagaflakes (PF) instead of iGoogle. I found the layout Google Reader (GR) wasn’t that great for feeds – but that’s only my personal feeling. If you like GR then stick with it!
I agree with your concerns about folksonomies. I may tag a site about information literacy as ‘info_lit’ and somebody else may use ‘info_literacy’ – two totally different tags. So if somebody comes along and clicks on the tag ‘info_literacy’ and not ‘info_lit’ it’ll of course mean they won’t see the sites I tagged.
Have a read of this brief article on the pro’s & con’s of folksonomies: http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/05-06-wt1/www/a_ens/future.htm.
You’re not alone in your concerns! Folksonomies are still relatively new so it’ll be one thing to keep an eye on.
Lawrence
Comment by Lawrence — July 8, 2009 @ 2:04 pm
Jumping in somewhat late on the classification vs folksonomies question, but I think it’s worth mentioning that we’re all librarians, and not everyone thinks the way we do!
Full disclosure: I do happily use tagging on various sites (mostly delicious & LibraryThing). I don’t think they’re a bad way of finding information, as long as you have a big enough pool of people doing it, as this will allow the most often used tags to come to the fore – it’s effectively user-generated classification. Because people are tagging things for themselves, they’re using words that they would look for, so it can be less artificial than a classification scheme (although you’re right, it will probably lack depth). For example, I might think a Biological Chemistry textbook should be tagged ‘Biology’, you might see ‘Chemistry’ as a better tag – but other people are both going to agree with each of us, and they’re both going to be able to find the book with via those tags. Making a choice to classify it in one place could stop that. (there’s a great article here which explains what I mean better than I do! http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html)
Also, in some cases you can get people (or the website/system) to combine tags, so clicking on one will give you a list of others – so the info_lit page might show you a link to the info_literacy page, and so on.
Just my thoughts!
Comment by Debbie Phillips — July 23, 2009 @ 3:06 pm