Social Tagging

This week we are exploring Social Tagging with websites like StumbleUpon.com and Delicious.com.

I have been a user of StumbleUpon for about a year and have discovered so many great things because of it. At first it was a little bit of an addiction, or rather, an obsession. I loved being able to explore the world and many of it's wonders with just a click of my mouse. With SU (abbreviating is much easier than writing StumbleUpon out completely) you are able to input your interests when you set up your account so that when you "stumble" your results will be tailored to your preferences. If you like food for example your results might be food blogs, recipes, reviews, etc. Another great feature of SU is that you are able to "like" or "dislike" a page that was suggested by SU, this helps tailor your preferences and allows for saving of the pages that you "liked"; there have been many times that I've wanted to recall something that I stumbled upon and all I had to do was go to my "likes" and BAM there it was!

I signed up for a Delicious.com account this week and did a little exploring. From what I can tell it is more of a browsing service, where SU is not. You have to do the work of exploring other user's boards and searching through tags. This is a great system if you have a specific need in mind and want to just search for that one thing, for example, if I needed ideas for decorating my child's room I could just search "kid's decor" or something like that. I personally really enjoy the ease of SU and the journey that it takes you on. I get easily over whelmed with sites like Delicous.com that leave me to do the work of sifting through thousands of boards.

One site that I have come to love as of late is Pinterest.com. This site allows you to make "boards", similar to Delicious.com, but there isn't any tagging in the traditional sense. With Pinterest you explore peoples boards in an organized, categorized fashion and then you can "re pin" a pin to your board if you want to for your followers to see. It just seems a little bit more organized, and quite frankly, more aesthetically pleasing than delicious.com, but that's just my opinion.

Go check them out if you haven't!

www.stumbleupon.com
www.delicious.com
www.pinterest.com