How I Realized Tagging and Social Bookmarking Is Important!

This week in GRAD602 we discussed social bookmarking and tagging.  To be incredibly honest, I had never given these social media practices much thought in the past.  Until this class and a personal experience in reading a blog with horrible tagging practices, I didn't think these practices were of much use.  Together, they changed my outlook on social bookmarking and tagging.  Here's how I came to this revelation....

For some time now as part of my daily leisurely reading, I follow fashion blogs.  Every once and a while, there is an outfit that sticks out in my mind and I remember it well.  Earlier last week, I wanted to find a particular outfit that stuck out in my mind on this fashion blog I follow.  I knew that blog post was from months ago.  The blogger had tags, but I couldn't locate that blog post using those tags.  Finally, after searching back through months of posts, I found what I was looking for.  At the time, I was annoyed it took so long to find what I wanted, but thought I was the problem and must have been searching incorrectly.  It wasn't until class later in the week that I realized why it took me so long to locate the past blog post.  The blogger's tags were too generic.  She needed to be more specific.  Had she been more specific and straightforward, I would have located it immediately.  Instead, I had to search multiple tags hoping it was located in there (which it wasn't) and ultimately gave up and decided looking through the archives was a smarter and more efficient way to go.

Prior to my experience of reading a blog with horrible tagging practices and this class, I thought these social media practices were not useful to a science researcher or educator.  But, my eyes were opened.  For instance, as a research scientist, we need to be able to recall papers and data quickly that relate to your particular project.  Unless you have a photographic memory, this is hard to do.  I think Diigo is an excellent way to organize all that information.  I had never even heard of Diigo before.  So, when I learned about it in class I was amazed and immediately thought "wished I had used this during my Ph.D. work!" Plus, an added bonus is letting a colleague or student access the folder in order to share information and knowledge.  Additionally, if trying to locate something as trivial as an old fashion blog post made me incredibly frustrated because the blogger had horrible tagging practices, then it made me re-evaluate a student's frustration when they want to recall a blog post on a particular subject matter that might not be so easy to recall.  Having good tags would help alleivate the problem and make the student less frustrated in the long run when trying to recall past subject matter.  Together, a "real-world" example and GRAD602, made me realize that tagging and social bookmarking is incredibly important.