An Hour In...

First off I have to say that I think it is a bit naive to think that we can explore this week's assignment in 15 minutes (the amount of time these assignments were to take)...I'm not really complaining as it was all interesting, but I can see how people wind up spending hours and hours of their life on the computer!!

After checking out several staff blogs I have decided to follow as many as I can (after figuring out how easy that was) so that I can somehow make some kind of personal connection to this experiment. Some made me laugh, some had great titles, some were exhibiting skills I wanted to learn (like how to get pictures on your blog), and many, many, many people out there are like me: unsure how these technologies work, how to protect our personal information, and wanting to get as much as we can out of this experience.

Delicious...at first is anything but!! I have tried to use the best websites site from Delicious before and I have to say it is so unattractive and difficult to use. My past experiences with the site usually ended with me giving up without getting my questions answered. I really missed our old Best Web Sites!!

Then I somehow stumbled onto the "Social Bookmarking" page...
WHAT A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE!!!

Slight adjustments in the visuals made it much more attractive and it was also easier to find information. I wasn't able to spend as much time as I would have liked exploring this new aspect of Delicious, but already I feel that I could give Delicious another try. I feel much more comfortable. It seemed to me that in the previous Delicious you pretty much had to use tags. That was the only way to even make an attempt to find what you were looking for. I will try again later in the week and report more.

Until then...

kuri

Ok, So I'm back after figuring out a bit more:

The Best Websites is the ugmo version and Delicious is the Social Bookmarking. Give the girl a prize!! Ok...so here I go...

The disadvantages of storing/sharing/tagging webcontent in this way are that the tags can be a bit broad or vague. Words often have different connotations for different people. For instance, the tag "inspiration" brought up lots of material ranging from how to design your blog to motivational quotes. WOW!!

And perhaps that is one of the advantages as well...that the tags give a lot of information--perhaps much much more than was expected. For example, with the tag "food" I discovered that McDonald's is scraping its composting program because the food served at these "restaurants" doesn't decompose. And I wasn't exactly looking for canned unicorn meat...but there it is...on the ThinkGeek website!!

So I'm left wondering about how useful tags really are. In a smaller situation, like on the CPL website for example, tags are quite useful on the movie blog. There are only so many genres or sub-genres and away you go, but on the WORLDWIDEWEB, the amount of information is astounding. I'm thinking that you'd have to sort through a lot of chaff to get to the wheat. Perhaps someone out there could help me to understand how to sort this material to a mangeable amount...any takers?

kuri