del.icio.us

by Emily Rimland, Reference Librarian, Penn State University Libraries.
For details, contact: erimland@psu.edu

Here’s the situation: You discover a great web site while working in your office and quickly bookmark it in your browser as you dash off to a meeting. Later, you are at a reference desk and want to view that site again but you don’t remember the exact name and can’t seem to locate it. After a busy day, you sit down at your home computer, try to find that site again, but alas, it still evades you.

If you have ever found yourself in this situation, a tasty little web-based treat called del.icio.us might satisfy your bookmarking appetite.

Features
del.icio.us (a peculiar domain name indeed, found at http://del.icio.us/) is a social bookmarking site. This means you can use it to save and organize your bookmarks online, which lets you access them from any computer. del.icio.us sets your bookmarks free—no longer do they need to be tethered to one computer!

If this feature alone doesn’t make del.icio.us one of the best web-based tools since webmail, it also allows you to create your own tags to organize all your bookmarks. Tags are one-word descriptions you add to bookmarked sites to group and organize them. You can almost think of tagging as your own home-grown Library of Congress classification system.

A final feature of del.icio.us gives it its social component. If you choose, you can make your collection of bookmarks public so that your friends, co-workers, and family can see what you’re bookmarking. Conversely, you can search to find what other people find interesting enough to bookmark. You can use del.icio.us to collaborate on a project, discover more about a hobby, or simply for serendipitous browsing.

Already have your bookmarks organized in your browser? del.icio.us has an import feature. It also has handy toolbar buttons that make posting new sites to your free del.icio.us account even easier.

del.icio.us is a fun, easy-to-use, web 2.0 tool that will make your web life much easier and more efficient. Go ahead, try it—it’s delicious!

Check out the getting started page at: http://del.icio.us/help/getstarted

del.icio.us lets you organize, share, and discover bookmarks

Tag Clouds

Until recently, the word ‘cloud’ referred to fluffy or angry-looking formations in the sky. Now our information horizon holds a different kind of cloud that’s also worth learning about …. the Tag Cloud.

Tag Clouds are alphabetic lists of terms or keywords that visually represent web pages they point to. Each term in the tag cloud links to the web page(s) to which that same term was assigned. When you visit web sites that use tag clouds, heavily-used (popular) tags usually appear in larger, bolder font, so it is easy to quickly see the most popular topics. The tag cloud illustrated here is from Flickr, the photo management web site. Flickr was one of the first sites to use cloud tags. Some other popular sites that use tag clouds are:

• del.icio.us (bookmarks site)
• LibraryThing (communally-cataloged books)
• Technorati (bloggers site)

Why Tag?
In addition to using clouds to navigate around other sites, you can also use tag clouds to assign meaningful words of your own choosing to web pages. Your ever-growing list of words can be used multiple times, and you can also add or delete words at any time. So tags provide a meaningful way to ‘catalog’sites you want to organize and return to. This type of cataloging does not rely on controlled thesauri; you create your controlled list as you go along.

Tag clouds also have a “social networking” function. For instance, if you use the Flickr photo site, and assign the term “cat” to a photo, you can also visit the other 800,000+ photos that have used that same term!

Just How Popular is Tagging?
A recent Pew study (December 2006) found that 28% of U.S. Internet users have tagged materials such as photos, news stories or blog posts. They report further that on a typical day online, 7% of users use tags. Like everything else on the web, these percentages will likely increase by leaps and bounds. Stay tuned!

Trillian

The new Libraries’ staff and reference desk images will include Trillian, which many users consider the ultimate chat program. With so many different chat mediums such as MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ and IRC available today, Trillian allows us to connect transparently with any of the major IM providers through a single client.

Many Libraries are using Trillian as the chat client for live reference assistance. Patrons can communicate with the library by utilizing the IM software they normally use.

Organizations are also using it for work-related activities, such as virtual meetings.

Bit of Trivia: This program was named after Trillian, a fictional character in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.

Trillian’s standard features include: audio chat, group chats, chat rooms, buddy icons, privacy settings, and more! Trillian also supports fonts and emoticons for emphasis, and the ability to include URLs.

Trillian incorporates contacts from every supported chat medium into one easily managed contact list.