Social Tagging

I watched the short video Social Bookmarking in Plain English. This was an excellent, easy to understand, simplified way of presenting these ideas.
(I tried to upload the video onto the blog but didnt succeed!)
I created a Del.icio.us login and set up the bookmark and the tag function and have started to tag various sites to see how it works.

I can see how at a personal level it is a great way to orgainse bookmarks and to provide multiple access points to the sites and blogs that one has found. For researchers it may have the benefit that in chosing the tags then presumably they mean most to that person and could work better to index and retrieve than the constaints of an external thesaurus. For those working in groups such as team teachers then agreed or commonly understood tagging terms could offer great oportunities for sharing resources.
I am not sure the concept of social tagging would ever replace the subject thesauri that have evolved to uniformly index published research, if these dataabses ever became "dynamic" or wiki-fied?