I’m del.icio.us

I'm taking a break from churning out my first paper for Digital Libraries to express the childlike, hyperactive joy which is welling up inside me. Well, maybe that's just the caffeine. But here it is, I am now officially jumping on to the bandwagon that all my favorite library bloggers have been on for months if not years. Social bookmarking rocks my world! I knew del.icio.us was out there, but I never bothered to actually use it until I kind of sort of got this idea that I should write about is a form of metadata which can improve access to information on the WWW. (The topic for aforementioned paper was access to info on the Web). Researching social bookmarking led me to folksonomy, which led me to these awesomeful conference talk notes by Clay Shirky. He has got me totally bending my mind about why navigating the Web really is different from navigating the stacks of your library, and how if we ever want to really harness what the Web can do for us we have got to come up with better ways of searching it and being able to locate what we want. Best of all, the best people to figure all this is out is all of us! As Mr. Shirky says, the only group that can organize everything is everybody. The web will not be tamed by librarians, it will be tamed by librarians providing ways for people to find the cool stuff and share it. Or librarians will be totally out of the picture, who knows. Hunting the Web is a big sloppy kiss of words, desires, and information at your finger tips.

This is what I dig.