nerds

Some people go camping in the summer. Other people have barbecues. I’m reorganizing my del.icio.us bookmarks.

I am a bona fide bookmark nerd and have been using the Del.icio.us collaborative tagging system since 2005. I think the folksonomy approach is neato-kamito, but my experience has been that tags don’t always facilitate good discrimination of search results.

It didn’t really bother me until I used Del.icio.us to bookmark research for a term paper for LIBR 200 about the current crisis facing the newspaper industry. My casual tagging structure made it challenging to locate specific subset of information, such as blog posts written by Clay Shirky on the subject of micropayments, as opposed to blog posts written about Clay Shirky on the subject of micropayments.

This is not to fault the system; the deficiencies I experienced were due more to do with my amateur tagging strategies than with the limitations of Del.icio.us itself. In fact, after completing my first semester in the MLIS program, I sensed there was a lot more I could do with Del.icio.us. Although I would characterize most tags in Del.icio.us as post-coordinated terms (Clay Shirky), there is nothing that probihits the creation of pre-coordinated terms (Authors -> Clay Shirky). Likewise, there is nothing that prohibits the creation of specialized tags (thomchick_toolbox) that have little or no shared meaning to the Del.icio.us community at large.

I also admit to having an intellectual curiosity about Del.icio.us, as most of the research about Del.icio.us that I’ve been exposed to seems to focus on the social and statistical aspects of collaborative tagging, whereas I am interested in the efficacy of Del.icio.us as an information retrieval tool. Towards this end, I decided to build a structured tagging system and conduct a basic evaluation using techniques and tools from LIBR 202. But how to structure my tags? Dewey? Library of Congress? How about something more Web2.0-ie? Something like…..Dublin Core! Totally Web2.0-ie, and a wee bit Irish. Suddenly I felt as if Moses himself had brought forth an element set down from Mount Sinai.

Standards Brought Forth to Man by Moses himself

Moses Returning from Mount Sinai with the Dublin Core Element Set

Yes, that was the actual decision-making process I followed. And so it began.

And speaking of Clay Shirky, here is what he has to say about categories, links and tags.