[because i'm a little obsessed, and also a graduate student.] [i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage]

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because

scratchyfishie called me on it, i must confess: i'm using you guys for preliminary research for my masters' thesis. i hope you can forgive me (and, um, keep answering my polls).

the poll behind this cut is designed for anyone to take; whether or not you use del.icio.us or another social bookmarking system that uses tagging, whether or not you have a macintosh computer, whether or not you read or bookmark fanfiction - in fact, i'm particularly interested in your responses if you DON'T do any of these things. please answer all the questions with your gut feeling, whether or not you have any idea what the answers are talking about. it would be most appreciated by a starving graduate student trying to find a thesis.

[Poll #610227]

thanks. (and please, like always, feel free to link this around; i'd like as big a sample as possible.)

Mood::

curious

Music:: The Tain (V) - The Decemberists - 2005-10-19 @ the Metro, Ch

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There are 8 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

I'm not currently using delicious myself (though I should start, it would be perfect for organizing recs bookmarks) I do follow other people's tags/delicious lists and I have to say, it depends...if I'm following a tag that is called "sga" I'm not going to see ANY of those tags for the fic example you used unless there is ALSO an sga tag or I'm also following any of those...or if I were a less voracious reader, perhaps I would follow a wider tag, like "fanfiction". Given what I use tags for, that's sort of a given, but it wouldn't work for everyone. Likewise, I would bookmark maybe a tech tip or two a year, so "OSX" would be a more specific tag than I would need - I would use one of the larger tags I listed, like "tech tips" or "web tricks" or something. But for someone like 43 folders or someone else who does a lot of tech tip bookmarking, OSX might be a more useful tag, to help distinguish those tips from the myriad of javascript tips and small software helps they have also bookmarked. Bookmarking is contextual to the person doing the bookmarking, and how they organize it, which I imagine is one of the central issues you're struggling with right now!

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Bookmarking is contextual to the person doing the bookmarking, and how they organize it, which I imagine is one of the central issues you're struggling with right now!

that's *exactly* what this poll is about! the more i read and think about it, the more i'm aware of how user vocabulary choices affect tagging structure - and usefulness of tags - and i'm just so damn fascinated by it that i can't stop asking questions. :)

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I guess what I'm talking about is not just vocabulary but ... scope? So, not the language itself, but the sort of context in which it is used (cue interminable linguistic niggling over the possibility of separating the two in any meaningful way)... in the case of stuff like sheppard/mckay and mckay/sheppard, and john/rodney and mcshep, that's a vocab issue, right, since they all mean the same thing. To a lesser extent, ditto Mac/Macintosh/Apple/OSX at this point. But if you're not working at that level of specificity, it's moot - I would probably NOT tag anything (if I ever get around to using delicious) by pairing or OS, because I work on a much more general level for both of those types of things. I think the biggest difference you'd see here would come on the interaction between the individual bookmarking level (how many things do I bookmark a year? 500? 600?) and the community bookmarking level (things like daily_kos, that lets members choose from a menu of predetermined bookmarks, or if kuro5hin.org started using tags (have they?) or other online news sources and communities - they'd need those specificity levels because of their traffic volume.

Does that make sense?

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Please note that I'm a librarian, so my tendency to use sub- and sub-sub- tags may be a little, er, neurotic and not usual. ;)

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hee! well, i'm a future librarian trying to figure this stuff out, so i'm glad to have the input of other librarins. :)

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Have you considered posting a link in

tickybox?

Also, you might check out Library Thing (http://www.librarything.com/), in which people define their own tags for books.

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i've seen - and used! - library thing, and while i love the idea, i find the interface really clunky. the tagging interface is fantastic, but adding books is too slow for my impatient self.

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I find I don't tag by pairing, simply by fandom, possibly because I prefer to have fewer tags than more? Or possibly since because I don't read many pairings, it's not necessary? Of course, the only delicious tags I use are recs-[fandom] and recs-[date] and recs-xover (which would be tagged with both individual fandoms and the date as well) because I only use it for organizing recs.

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