Thing 18: Organizing with Tags

Now that you have begun exploring the benefits of social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, such as the ability to access your "favorites" from any computer and discover popular websites for different subjects, let's now discuss how to better organize your saved bookmarks. As you can imagine, when the number of bookmarked websites grows it can become a little troublesome to navigate through them all to find the one site that would best suit your information need. For that reason, it becomes important to create categories (similar to a file folder) for your websites. This is done through a process of creating "tags" or descriptive subject headings for the various websites that you have saved.

Tagging is an open and informal method of categorization that allows users to associate keywords with online content. The process is completely unstructured so that you can create connections between data by the tags (or keywords) of your choice. Examples of digital content that can be tagged includes stored webpages in Del.icio.us, photos (like those that are added to pictures in Flickr) and even blog posts. Once a tag is created for a saved website, you can then easily use your bookmarking site as your personal search engine. You can simply click on a given tag name and links to all of the websites associated with that subject heading will be displayed on the main screen.

This will be easier to understand by taking a look at tags in action.

Discovery Activity:

1. Go take another look at my Del.icio.us account, where you will notice a large list of "tags" located on the right-hand side of the screen. Some of them have even been "bundled" into larger subject categories. Click on a few of these tags to discover some of the websites that I have saved. You may also see a more detailed description of the website contents included below the link to the site. Adding these tags and descriptions assists me in finding needed resources more quickly.

2. From the Del.icio.us homepage, try searching for a subject that interests you by entering your search term into the box located at the upper right-hand side of the screen. (Here are the results from the search "colleges"). Next to each website you will see a highlighted portion that gives the number of people who have bookmarked that site. This is a great way to find websites that are more popular for a given subject.

3. Create a blog post about your thoughts on how utilizing tags with digital content can help personalize your online experience.

Optional Challenge: Go back to some of your posts on Blogger and add tags that describe the subject matter contained in the posts. This allows people reading your blog to more easily find archived material on a particular subject.