Social book marking and folksonomy

This is my take on this weeks topic:-

Del.icio.us - I think this is a really good site to use. I hot desk a lot at work, being the part timer and each time I sit at another pc I have to set up my favourites once again. I really like the idea that I can have my list of web sites available to me wherever I sign on - at home included. The fact that I can also share this list with others is another positive advantage. In fact I think the only disadvantage I could see with this is the fact that I may end up adding too many of my favourite web sites to the list and it getting too long! I need to start using this to get a fuller idea of it's full potential, but I can see no reason why I would not promote this to say a clinical tutor who could set up a list of relevant web sites which then could be used by their students.

Connotea -I really liked this one. I could see that this site could be used by researchers to save all the articles for a particular subject in one electronic site so that they can then refer to them when ever they need to. I know that sometimes the number of articles required for one particular piece of research can be quite a lot and if you are able to save them somewhere electronically that can also be accessed from any Internet linked PC you would then be able to go back to refresh your memory or even just to have the reference details to hand when you need to add your references to your finished article. Again I could quite easily see myself promoting this service to the library users. Again as like del.icio.us it could be used to set up a reading list for course delegates to use.

Library thing - I am not too sure that in a medical library setting that this would be very useful. I can see the logic behind it, but I think that this is more a tool that librarians would get more use out of.

Flickr - I love this tool and will be using it to share my photos with my relatives who live further a field. I think that the concept is brilliant as not everyone has broadband at home and photo attachments to email can cause havoc when you try to send them. That said I not too sure that in the medical library setting that there would be much use for it. It can be a bit compulsive, I spent a good half hour on it this afternoon just looking at the Wolfhound pictures - it was a good job the sun was out and my son was happy playing in the back garden!

Slideshare - I think that this is an excellent tool because as we all have experienced in the past, when we have taken part in a course we like to have copies of the slides and with slideshare they can be added to this site and all you need to take away from the course or meeting is a url and you can go read the course through again and print off if you need a hard copy. This makes more sense to me that emailing 40 or so slides as an attachment which due to the size could mean that your email could get blocked up. This again is another tool that I think we could promote very well in the library setting.

I went through the other tools but I either couldn't see their uses or didn't think that they would be of much use to a medical library user.