Exercise 5

I've been working on this assignment while checking on Delicious and tracking information on Elizabeth Taylor who died today. I didn't think much about it, I often will check on something as a way to relax while I'm working, but I realized that I was checking her out on Delicious and I'd never conceptualized a search on Delicious before. I've been uncomfortable with the product for reasons unknown to me since we started class. I've been doing whatever assignments I needed to do but just hadn't been able to get the feel of the software. Even assignment five seemed unwieldy, going back and forth between the instructions and the program. And then as I said I realized I was doing a dedicated search in my spare moments on Elizabeth Taylor on the same software.
I had a lot of difficulty looking for things with Delicious for sometime and as a result, didn't want to use it. But the experience of looking for Elizabeth Taylor made me realize that it was more motivation than lack of knowledge keeping me from utilizing Delicious software. While I had been tagging articles through the semester, I had no real sense of how to make the function mine. Once I started working in the software, chasing curious bits of information, I was able to start making connections to the controls.
Just some notes from what I learned:
Of the three items I chose for assignment five, the one most often picked was the social bookmarking definition from wikipedia. I'm a bit embarrassed to mention it as my choice but it is a good all around description of social bookmarking and 1406 taggers agreed with me. What was interesting was that other than wikipedia, the tags used weren't the tags I used. They make sense in the context but I wouldn't have thought to choose them from the article.Social bookmarking had 512 tags. Bookmarking had 402 tags and social had 349 tags. I would normally add the three together because of the similarity in tags but I wasn't sure of the taxonomy issues there. Granted this is folksonomy but did social cover social bookmarking? Would socialbookmarking cover marking?
For the last segment of tags,I liked the animated piece that someone from the class choose on You Tube and chose it for my own, "The surprising truth about what motivates us", an animated video that speaks to motivation in learning and making new technologies in the workplace. I got excited about finding more items like that in a search, but the tags led me nowhere. I think this would be a good example of learning to use several programs together as You Tube generally tags videos.