I have to admit I went into this exploration of del.icio.us with very high doubts about its usefulness. I was wrong. I suppose my greatest problem with folksonomies comes from looking at tags used on Amazon… some clever individuals frequently tag items with words that have nothing to do with the item at all. I’m still a strong advocate of controlled vocabulary, but at least now I understand that tagging doesn’t always have to be a bad thing.
I searched Yann Tiersen as a tag on del.icio.us and every hit was pertinent, whereas a Google search gives me a ton of stuff I don’t want. However, in Google’s defense, you can limit your searches using the advanced search, but I suppose that’s not quite as intuitive as tagging can be. Another feature I like about Google is that it takes into account that some of us are poor spellers. You have to spell the tag exactly right in del.icio.us, and it’s sometimes difficult to remember if a name like Tiersen is spelled Tierson or Tiersen. The fact that Tierson produced only one hit clued me in that I had spelled it wrong. But these are trivial complaints. I do like the idea of tagging sites I like as I’m surfing around. It doesn’t happen often, but there have been times where I’d find a great website, not bookmark it because I don’t want to be inundated with bookmarks (kind of like RSS feeds, the potential for clutter is phenomenal), and then forget how I got there so I can’t find it again. I still need to explore this software some more, but so far I’m impressed.
