Organizing What You Find - Information Trapping: Real-Time Research on the Web - page 268

Web-Based Organizing Options
he intention of this type of solution is the same as client-based solutions—
to help you organize the information you ind. But in execution, Web-based
solutions are a little diferent. here may be a limit to how much you can
have stored on a site. With your speed of access there may be only so much
you want to access at a time. You may have security or privacy concerns.
Like going from plain text iles to something really extensive like Onfolio,
you have your choice in Web-based solutions, from the really basic to the
really extensive. We'll start with the basic and then get more complex.
When I say simple, I mean simple. I mean what are basically bookmarks
online. For just saving a list of URLs and sites, I like using tagging sites like
del.icio.us and RawSugar.
tagging sites
We have discussed tagging earlier in the topic. Now let's look at it briely
from a user perspective as opposed to a researcher perspective.
Tagging sites allow you to save pointers to Web sites with both descriptions
and tags. And as we've seen earlier, if enough people participate in a site
that allows tags, then soon you develop a very large and active collection of
resources that are searchable by keyword.
Because it is currently the eminent tagging site and because there are so many
tools to make using it easier, I'm going to cover del.icio.us here. But I'm going
to also mention other tagging sites that you may want to check out.
For all that I love about del.icio.us (del.icio.us/), I can't stand the name
(I can't seem to stop typing it incorrectly), so as you've probably already
noticed, I call it Del instead. To use Del, you'll need to register, which
requires a user name, password, and e-mail. Once you've conirmed and set
up your account, you have a couple of options.
he irst option is to take ten minutes or so and try out some keywords, see what
other Del users have bookmarked for the keywords in which you're interested.
his will potentially give you some new resources to put in Del, as well as some
ideas as to what keywords you should be using to tag your resources.
he second thing you can do is start suring and dropping things into del.
icio.us as you ind them. here are a lot of tools available to make this easy.