In this lesson we will explore further the role of social tagging in the development of the web and, in particular, look at how social tagging helps users find and share knowledge.

We'll begin with some feedback from and discussion of the last lesson and your prep on Flickr. If you haven't already done so, your set teacher may use some of this lesson to show you the TED talk on Photosynth (hyperlinking the world's photographs) and explain how this was used by CNN during Obama's inauguration.

Delicious.  Some of you may already know this, a social bookmarking site. Have a look at Learn more about Delicious: read all of it, including the explanation of tagging.

From 7 things you should know about social bookmarking (Educause, 2007, pdf):

Tagging information resources with keywords has the potential to change how we store and find information. It may become less important to know and remember where information was found and more important to know how to retrieve it using a framework created by and shared with peers and colleagues. Social bookmarking simplifies the distribution of reference lists, bibliographies, papers, and other resources among peers or students.

We'll now look at this video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English.

Examples of del.icio.us accounts created by teachers, students and classes:

A classics class at SPS on Delicious

A student account (originating in an English class)

A teacher's account

Sherborne's Physics Dept on Delicious

Create a Delicious account (if you haven't already got one). Then read Getting started?.  Please note that the buttons that Delicious can add to your browser will not endure from session to session for you at school. Add them to your own devices' browser(s), but at school, if you want to bookmark a page to Delicious, you'll probably need to use the posting page (and you'll need to be logged in).

You'll have further questions about Delicious and the very useful main help page is here. Pages that we think you should look at include:

Tags – explanations and tips

Bookmarks – saving, editing, deleting, privacy, imports

Network, Subscriptions, and Inbox – sharing and watching bookmarks

Searching and navigating – finding the bookmarks you want

Finally, in the lesson, we'll watch, and discuss, this video about how the web has changed the way we find and access knowledge:

Prep: read Bruce Sterling's Order Out of Chaos and How To Use Delicious To Take Over the World. Write a blog post, about tagging — you can look at what use Flickr makes of tags — and about Delicious.