Blue 2.0: Google docs

Setting up my del.icio.us account was not hard. It was very easy actually. I've heard about it for a long time, but never took the time to find out more about it. Now that's I've used it some, I'm still not sure I would use it regularly. Some of my reasons are described below.

I'm not really sure what the benefit of this is. I already have a lot of sites bookmarked on both my PC at work and my laptop at home. I rarely find myself in dire need of a particular link when I'm at some other computer, which is pretty rare itself. So I'm not sure I'll use this much.

I added the Blue 2.0 page to my "network" on del.icio.us as the assignment required. But when I went to look at my network I see a huge list of all the links they have on their del.icio.us site. So does that mean that if I add more people's del.icio.us account to my network that list of links will get even longer? It seems a little weird to me to have this huge list of ever growing links with the only organization on them being these random tags. The fact that tags can be chosen in any way each user wants doesn't seem like it would be very helpful.

For example, I added links to my three main professional organization's websites to my account. I tagged them "professional." The Music Library Association was saved by 67 other people, so I went to look at who those people were and noticed that several of them didn't use "professional" as a tag, but instead used "association." Not exactly the best system; but I'm a cataloger, so I prefer some kind of controlled vocabulary. A controlled vocabulary has so many more benefits than random tagging.

Overall, I did learn finally what del.icio.us is (and how hard it is to type that when you're trying to talk aout it). I don't know that I can see using this very often. So this was probably just an exercise in discovery and nothing more for me.

On the other hand, I am creating this document using Google Docs. It looks like you can use Google to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Since these documents can then be shared and edited by a group of people it seems like this would be great for when you have a professional committee or task force who all have to work on something together. It beats sending attachments back and forth, trying to keep track of the changes, and saving upteen versions of the same thing on everyone's machine.

Okay, now that I'm done writing, I just have to figure out what to do next. That is, where does this get "saved"? Hmm ...