Value of Tags

Yesterday I met with the faculty in the IT Leadership program.  During our meeting we discussed some useful web-based resources to enhance our online courses.  As part of this discussion we decided it would be useful to develop a type of library of links to these online resources.  I agreed and volunteered to develop a way to share these links with the group.

Today I went back to my Delicious account that has been idle for many months to begin adding links to some of the sites we identified the day before.  While adding these links I decided I didn't want everyone to have to go through all my links to find those relevant to teaching but rather simply find those links related to teaching resources.  This is where tags came in.

I created a new "faculty" tag and added this tag to existing teaching resource links as well as links to the new resources we identified the day before.  The beauty of this tagging approach is I can now use a unique URL that will filter all of my Delicious links to display only those tagged as faculty.  The URL http://www.delicious.com/bolson1/faculty points to the faculty tagged items my Delicious account.  The tags enable me create virtual tag lists within my Delicious account.  Additionally, I can use multiple tags for any given link and it will appear in multiple lists.

I know this is nothing new but I was excited to have the opportunity to take advantage of the tagging function in Delicious.