Thing 10: Delicious Networks

For this Thing, it was time to delve a bit further into the more social aspects of Delicious. It was interesting to be able to see a "timeline" of which members of your network had bookmarked which link when - this also clarified the link between Delicious and sites such as Reddit for me! I imagine the ability to subscribe to a person's bookmarks via RSS could also be quite handy - though more so in the case of institutional pages I think. I was pleased to see that, as well as the bookmark subscription detailed above, an RSS feed could also be used to subscribe to bookmarks posted with a particular tag or selection of tags.
Playing about with the Delicious network explorer got me thinking about my own rather meager Delicious network - as with many social sites (ie - Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr) there's a bit of a delicate balance: the more people in your network, the more content you receive - but it can also mean things get a bit cluttered. With a site such as this, I'm not sure if subscribing to particular tags or subjects, rather than people, might make more sense - I'm very much still re-discovering the site though. I think over the next few weeks I will continue to explore it, perhaps taking heed of some of Susan's examples for more productive Delicious use.
Looking at Delicious from a library point of view, the examples provided seem to use it to provide relevant resources to a particular subject area or topic. The tags used seemed to be a lot clearer and more specific than the ones set by personal users, and I imagine this would make the site more useful still for those using it from a more academic (rather than leisurely) point of view. Laura raises some interesting points, however, about how used sites like these actually are - and this seems to be a sentiment which is echoed through quite a number of the 23 Things blogs. The level of organisation and indeed "usefulness" of such sites becomes irrelevant if they're not actually accessed by their target audience (in the case of libraries, the readers).