Thing 6 - Controlling the web

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are a great web tool. I use them in the Library and at home and they're very convenient. Out of the three methods this task looks at, browser bookmarks are my favourite way to keep track of useful websites.

Browser bookmarks are great, all the websites I need are just a click away and adding them is very easy. The "limitation" of having them confined to one computer isn't a huge obstacle as the bookmarks I have at home won't be the same ones I use at work and vice-versa, plus I only use the one machine in the library so it not a big problem really. I can see how someone who uses multiple machines might be annoyed at not instantly having all there bookmarks in sync on their machines but setting up new bookmarks is a very quick process and with a small amount of upkeep you can have all your bookmarks on all the machines you use.

NHS Evidence bookmarks are not as good. Sure most forms of bookmarks are useful but there were just too many screens to click through to get to the bookmarks, it looks pretty slow next to IE or Firefox where you have one click and you're there functionality. Also, you can probably just Google what you need faster than logging into Athens and navigating to the page (unless you bookmark your bookmarks).


I don't know what to make of Delicious. "Social Bookmarking" sounds like a good idea on paper but I don't see myself using it very much. Maybe if you are working on a collaborative project with many other individuals it might be useful but at the same time you can just email other people a link and cut out the middle man/website.

Tagging

Tagging is a good idea, in theory. Tagging is good if you are producing something you want other people to discover such as a youtube video or work of art/literature. I don't know why I'd add them to my bookmarks though. I know what my bookmarks are and where they go, I organise them as I create them and I don't need a computer to do this for me thank you very much. The downside to tags has already been mentioned in the 12 things blog so I'll just say the lack of a universal standard of predefined tags can be problematic and I'll leave it at that.

Personal Homepage

I've looked at the idea of a personal homepage before and honestly I don't see how it would be very useful to me, especially if I have bookmarks that take me wherever I want to  go. The example sites on the 12 things blog were just walls of text and didn't look very inviting. I don't think I'd use it in the Library, our website has all the resources users need and sending them to another site that in all likelihood will just send them back to the Library website seems like an exercise in futility. However, someone who uses a lot of RSS feeds may find something like this useful, not being one of these people I can't say anymore than that.