Delicious

Delicious caught my imagination for a while, as an alternative to Google when browsing in areas of interest it has its good points. By starting with a basic search of tags you can go to peoples lists and find things you may never thought of looking for.  It has a nice magical mystery tour vibe in this way.
However I have also found I ran up against a lot of dead ends when trying to browse through, basically it seems like something for a lazy day when i have an awfully large amount of free time to waste, and those are rare at the moment.  There are also an annoying number of oddly categorised pages (sometimes possibly just a different idea of meaning, but sometimes seemingly deliberately miscategorised to bring up adult pages when looking for, say, jewelery)

It seems to come down to the folksonomy thing, looking at what has caught other, possibly similar peoples eye, leading them to tag and share, versus finding things through Google with its secret search algorythms. I have found a few interesting pages that I would not have been likely to otherwise on Delicious, but in the end I have found alot more by Google searching, with less dead links and misdirection.

I have never remembered to share anything on Delicious when browsing, I probably should.

Delicious does however remind me of Folksonomies.  Letting the public add their own tags to your collection, the way of the future? Dangerous? meaningful? or useless?  One thing I really enjoyed for a few hours at least was looking at the user created tags on the Powerhouse Museums online collection.

I recommend the Powerhouse museums online collection anyway for people interested in artifacts from the past. But it is also interesting from the standpoint of collaborative tagging. Along with their 'proper' subject headings, and machine produced subject headings, they feature user tags.  I found it very interesting to follow the user tags, generally not to find items, but more usually to try to work out what the reason may be for placing such tags.  There were a lot of peoples names tagged, or 'I like this' or a date, or some phrase that seemed to show people were using the tags for their own purposes to bookmark items.  In that way it kind of reminds me of unofficial Delicious, but it muddies the waters a little for other users.  There were a number of just plain wrong tags as well, describing the object with misleading names or colours e'g' 'green shoe' on a pair of brown boots. 

But I like to hope that one day folksonomy and its friends will become more useful and serve a function a little like Delicious, where people can add their own classification input which lets items be found based on transient headings like subculture tags and so on, seeing things in a different light, with different possible uses, and sharing that with others should be good, but maybe a little more organisation would make such exploration quicker.