Crowdsourcing Assignment
When I bookmarked my pages for this assignment (which asked us to bookmark at least 10 pages on Delicious with content applicable to this class) I was strangely thrilled when I found a page that had not been bookmarked before. It felt as though I was introducing this useful piece of information to the Delicious community at large. However, after I had bookmarked my pages I noticed that I was not really interested in other sites that had only been bookmarked by one person; I was interested in those that had been bookmarked by hundreds or even thousands of people. I think my approach was individual (and my sites were part of the long tail) but I was drawn to the bookmarks that are the product of the wisdom of all Delicious members. Just as Andrea Mercado and Joshua Porter said, the original impetus to using these sorts of tools is individual, but the great benefit comes from harnessing these individual impulses to create the wisdom of crowds. Does that mean that the odd and non-mainstream site does not get noticed, or does that mean that by bookmarking it in the first place in Delicious I am bringing it into a space where the ‘crowd’ has a chance to discover and publicize it? I hope it is the latter.
I found the actual process of tagging difficult and I realized afterwards that it was because I was trying to do two things at the same time: bookmark for myself and bookmark for others. These are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but tagging is much easier to do when you know why you are doing it.
The other issues I found with this process were ones discussed in my group project – the problem of trying to create tags for complex ideas or even for names that have more than one word (Delicious only allows single word tags) and the issues of using capital letters and plurals. I also found that as I searched for pages and then tagged them, I (a single tagger) did not always use the same word for the same topic. In traditional methods we worry about inter-indexer reliability, but I don’t even have interpersonal reliability!
So, there is no question that there are many issues with tagging and bookmarking on a site such as Delicious, but there is a great benefit (especially when using a common tag such as our class was doing). As I write this post, there are 1,439 pages tagged with LIS9763. That is an amazing number of pages and as I scrolled through them there were sites which jumped out at me and which I was curious to explore. In determining which sites interested me I used a traditional method (title and notes) but I also looked for sites that had been bookmarked often. This reinforced for me that though Delicious is a new and different way to find useful information it does not necessarily eclipse older methods of scanning and evaluating (and cataloguing).