MD 23 Things: Week 6: Tagging, Folksonomies & Technorati

[your neighborhood librarian]

I've used del.icio.us for a couple years now. I mainly use it to quick-store batches of sites for projects that I'm working on. For example, I'm working on an Internet safety presentation for the other parents at my son's school, and I've been getting little bits of research done here and there whenever I have a few moments. I store all those sites in del.icio.us with the tags "Internet" and "safety" and then when I get a chance to sit down and work on the presentation, they're all there in one clump.

I use Technorati mainly to have a look at who is linking to my blog (my other blog). But I get how you could use it to search blogs for articles about specific subjects, and even subscribe to the search results: for example, if I wanted any and all blog entries on the thylacine, or Tasmanian wolf, to show up in my Google Reader, I could.

Future of Library 2.0 / Web 2.0. You know what's going to be different?

We're going to work a lot more like Amazon - our damn OPACs are going to actually capture preference patterns and deliver cross-referenced search results. If someone's looking for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and they're all checked out, the OPAC's gonna say "Hey, wanna try The Lightning Thief?"

We're also going to work a lot more like Netflix - you're going to use something that works like LibraryThing to create a queue, and when you return one book, the next one is on the hold shelf for you. Well, somebody will figure out how that works.

But what I mean is, a lot of the existing technologies are going to be integrated more. That's what I think is most telling with Web 2.0 - Flickr is part of Yahoo and Blogger uses the same sign-in as Google... services will begin to line up and work together more seamlessly.