Thing 10: Delicious

Delicious is an interesting concept and can lead to increased understanding of the nature of human organization as much as it can keep URLs handy. We investigated social tagging somewhat at school; but Delicious seems much cleaner and, well, more organized than other systems. I have tried many different searches and I cannot seem to duplicate some of the results we ran into in school: Namely, anything weird. You can drill down into Delicious pretty far; even then I cannot find anything too esoteric or arcane. Delicious obviously does not edit tags in any way. So why are there not just weird or oddly personal tags? I am not sure, but I have an idea about tagging. It seems that most individuals tag a web site with what they think will be a good tag, as opposed to tagging it with what pops into their mind or what might actually cause them to remember the contents of the web site by merely glancing the tags. For example, I come across a web site containing imagery/photos that I think are funny. I could easily think of tags that I think will be a good tag and I know these tags would make more sense to others; but I have then over thought my own tags and thought about my tags as perceived by others. This quickly moves into ideas about determining what tags are useful (or most useful) and authority over tags. What if I tag photographs of apples as bananas? I guess I like authoritative determinations of aboutness, even if social tagging can have its benefits. This probably has to do with the way I search for things, research things, and save/store things: I would much rather interact with the data/information itself then what others might label it. I guess I am like a professional chef who doesn't want input from a novice; or like a professional athlete who does not want advice from a novice athlete. Yes, it is possible on special occasions that an amatuer might have something to offer a professional; but if they frequently do, why did I go to library school? and what does that say about the content and instruction in library school?
So, how would I use Delicious (and tools like it)? I would probably make it available to patrons because I understand they might want it; but I would not really use it that much myself - perhaps in the future I might; because I forecast that it will become more and more authoritative.