Blogging is a new thing for me. I read plenty of other people’s blogs and I occasionally comment on those that my friends keep up, but I’ve never wanted to write my own. Then I started LIBR 500: Foundations of Information Technology at SLAIS.

No, the module on Web 2.0 did not convince me that I want a blog. I simply have to create one as a final assignment on social software. Fitting that the assignment about social software should be in the form of a social software tool. I can appreciate the irony. It remains to be seen whether I will appreciate the task.

I’ve chosen to focus on social bookmarking and tagging in the library world. This blog will cover a few libraries that are using social bookmarking and tagging well (or not so well as the case may be). I assume that most bloggers begin with a topic they know a lot about and go from there. For me, I’ve used social bookmarking tools, I’ve tagged, but I’m blogging about a topic that I am still learning about.

What I do know? Well, when I think about the phenomenon that is referred to as “Web 2.0″, I think of the opportunities for individuals and communities to change the information on the web for themselves. To me, social bookmarking and tagging are some of the most interesting ways that people are adding information to the web. There is so much information on the web, and it has been traditional organized by search web directories such as, Yahoo! and search engines, such as the behemoth, Google. The average person using the web couldn’t decide how to organize the information. They could only search for information in the existing systems.

For a long time, browsers have allowed us to bookmark pages we frequently use. We could rename files on our own computers and put them in whatever folders we wanted with whatever names made sense to us. We could name our photos with labels that we understood and organize them on our computers in whatever order we chose. But all of this was happening offline. And each of us was doing our own separate thing that didn’t affect or benefit anyone else’s system, let alone the systems of organizing and retrieving information on the web as a whole.

Social bookmarking and tagging are different. The whole idea of bookmarking and tagging websites in del.icio.us or uploading and tagging photos on flickr is to share not only the sites and photos but your way of categorizing them. Other searches can use the terms you’ve attached to your own and others’ additions to search. The more people adding terms, the more information (or metadata) there is about the photo or site (or book, Facebook note, library catalog entry, etc.).

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder (2007), and the popular blog, Joho the Blog, addresses this shift to the general public applying shared and individual organizing techniques to shared information on the web. From the book:

But now we—the customers, the employees, anyone—can route around the second order. [...] We can do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later. Not only can we find what we need faster, but traditional authorities cannot maintain themselves by insisting that we have to go to them. [...] It is changing how we think the world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.

See full text of Chapter One of David Weinberger’s book here.

So who knows? Maybe I’ll become a blogger after all of this, or maybe I’ll become a more diligent tagger, or maybe I’ll just become a SLAIS student who is all finished with the infamous core. Whatever way it falls out, here it goes, Beth Cote’s attempt at a mini-blog.