Tagging and Folksonomies

In the article Social Tagging as a Knowledge Organization and Resource Discovery Tool, Hesham Allam discusses social tagging benefits and limitations. I read this article before I explored some of the social tagging sites. I want to start by saying that looking at the social tagging sites first-hand provided me with a better understanding about what they were all about than this article.
I did find Allam's discussion about the motivators behind tagging videos and pictures to be interesting. He states that users increase their tagging activity when they perceive others as viewing them. In addition to this social motivator, tags are used to communicate personal opinion and for indexing.


http://www.librarything.com/- I took the Library Thing tour. In theory this sounds like a pretty cool site. I thought I was being high-tech converting my list of books I want to read from a piece of paper to a word document. Next, I signed up! I think that some classmates did not find this site very user friendly. From a novice perspective, I thought that the site was pretty straightforward and easy to navigate. I plan to recommend this site to library users!

http://www.citeulike.org/- I found this site a little overwhelming. I think that for the amount of research I do, I am going to stick to subscriptions to online databases. I think it is great that there are free options for full-text articles, but I was not a fan of all the advertisements.

http://www.flickr.com/- I have heard a lot about Flickr. My sister might actually be a little more low-tech than me and she regularly uses the site. Personally, I just use Facebook to post pictures. I see that this site allows one to upload pictures once and then post them to either Facebook, email, Twitter or blogs. I think for someone that has more online presence than me, this site could be very useful. For personal use, I do not feel the need to have a flickr account. However, I think this would be a great resource for keeping indexes on events the go on in the library.