I have halfheartedly looked at del.icio.us before, but never really gave it a chance. However, looking at it after listening to Kathleen Gilroy's podcast was a new experience. It's such a different networking space than something like MySpace. I like that it is all about sharing and learning, and that it is so easy to navigate.
I was thinking about the contrast between traditional library research and using something like del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is such an interactive world, where people create the organizational scheme that is most useful to them, rather than being shackled to a system that was developed with others (ahem, librarians) in mind. And the labyrinth you enter when you start to delve into the tags and links is amazing...you can find things that you never could on your own. It's so different from more traditional research, which tends to be a solitary activity.
What will this mean for libraries? Many of the technologies and interactive spaces online are completely detached from real places; they can be accessed from anywhere that has internet access: a cell phone, a blackberry, an airplane, a car...
Will the library become simply a connection point? Will it become unnecessary to have a mortar-and-bricks library at all?
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