"Del.icio.us"Recipe for Research

After exploring del.icio.us via KCLS27things' list of popular bookmarks, I think this is one of the best web technologies we've encountered in the past weeks concerning a helpful tool for research. Like Amazon user reviews, del.icio.us offers an easy way to see how others categorize websites and what others really think about a website. For instance, imagine you're doing research on youth and the popularity of MySpace. You do a tag search for such terms and you come across an article entitled, oh let's say, "Identity Production in a Networked Culture: Why Youth Heart MySpace." Without even having to skim the article to see if it's useful, you can quickly read through user comments to find quick abstracts of the article. Once you've seen comments that suggest the article is a scholarly write up, you may (or may not) want to read the article for yourself. The best part of such web research applications is that users from different nations post their comments. KCLS is chock full of patrons from many countries who have a lot of difficulty researching in English as their second language. With del.icio.us, they can find commentary in their native tongue!!!