Thing 19 Social Bookmarking

Adobe Bridge has allowed users to tag photos for quite awhile, and though I haven't used that feature, I often regret that I haven't. Tagging websites though seems like a fabulous idea. I have a list of favorites at school and a list at home and invariably the site I need is listed on the other computer. Add to that the frustration of wading through the disorganized list of phrases that comprises my favorites list, looking for the one I vaguely remember, and using tags for social bookmarking looks better and better.

The feature that allows tags to be sorted with a + sign would allow me to refine my search of marked websites to separate the photography tutorials from the photography stores, and the social studies sites for teachers from the ones for students to visit.

As long as I overlap the tag lists of others at least some of the time, I can benefit from the research done by others and hopefully avoid some of the dead end, useless sites that come up in a search. I don't know yet how much of the description of the site will show, but it looks like there would be enough to let me know if someone else's photography or social studies site would be useful to me without actually visiting it first. Since the tag names can be edited, I should be able to make my list more useful to others and at the same time make other lists more accessible to me. This really looks like it could be extremely useful.

The only drawbacks I can wonder about are the possibility of someone tagging obscene material with innocuous tags, or some telemarketer somehow targeting people who tag sites in particular ways. I don't know if the second is possible, but some of those programmers seem to be able to do just about anything, and more junk mail is not what I want.