"Oh, Marjorie, this is positively de-lish!!!"

I found del.icio.us to be an interesting site. Often, I don't mind community sites that share your information and preferences with other users--like pathetic.org, fictionpress.net, Facebook, or even livejournal--but something about this site, like bloglines, doesn't sit well with me. Usually when I choose to bookmark a site, it's because it's the result of a complex Internet search that would be difficult to repeat. For example, the fifth result on the 17th page of an 11/26/05 Google search for "dominican friars" might be hard for me to find again unless I bookmarked it. And typically, I don't like other people knowing what sites I visit or enjoy; the sites that I don't mind sharing, everyone already knows about.

Even though I don't think it's my cup of tea, I can see benefits to a social tagging site. If I did a search on del.icio.us for "richardiii," I might find resources that other users only associated with the Yorkist king but wouldn't necessarily turn up during a Google search, thereby expanding my search results. Also, I use a lot of baby name websites when I'm writing, and it could be helpful for me to group them together in one category on del.icio.us instead of having them spread out in my Favorites folder depending on when I accessed them. (But, of course, I could just put them in a folder in my Favorites folder...) The cross-referencing possibilities also have their appeal. I reckon than a site about hentai could be tagged with things relating to Japan, comics, and homoerotica, and so could be useful when searching for any of those subjects. The portability of del.icio.us is also appealing, as was that of bloglines; no matter what computer you use, you can always access your favorite sites and streams.

The major pitfall I can see would be idiots doing the tagging--and, let's face it, idiots populate most of the world. Heck, at least 10% of the world would consider me an idiot of they met me! I've seen tags on YouTube with this problem: people think of tags like labels or captions instead of single-word search terms, or their tags are far too esoteric for anyone else to be able to use them. (I believe I referenced a problem with YouTube tagging back in my YouTube post.) And then, of course, there's the privacy issue... because everyone would be able to see which sites I had tagged and how I thought of them when I accessed them.

I explored del.icio.us a little bit and saw the comments left by other users on some of the tagged sites. The comments were helpful--some were reviews of the site, and some helped explain more fully what a site's purpose was. That could be useful when trying to search for something based on the tags of others.