del.icio.us search

I have heard of del.icio.us, but never actually explored it in earnest. I went to the homepage and played around with adding different terms to ‘web2.0,’ terms such as: Facebook, social network, academic. I then found that on the homepage of del.icio.us, you can type a term on the end of the URL, press enter and it will perform a search, example: http://del.icio.us/library2. The precision of the search was not 100%, but I thought it was an interesting way to start a search. I then used the column on the right hand side of the page to see what others had tagged with ‘library2.’

Our class readings presented both benefits and drawbacks from using folksonomies; using del.icio.us I see some areas for possible frustration from this use. If I include a space in between terms I want to search they are regarded as separate terms, such as web2.0 versus web 2.0, or should I use web2 or web 2. The very benefit of multiple tags in natural language is also a drawback because there are so many terms that could be used, where should you stop? Sometimes I feel like I could come up with more tags than there are words in the actual article I’m tagging. I do love the freedom and power tagging entrusted to each user to contribute what they can to the collective whole.