Delicious books

We're learning about Web 2.0 at work, so this blog will combine happy book suggestions AND information about new web technologies for a while. (Sounds serious- so I added a delicious donut to keep your attention!) This week, I'm looking at the website bookmarking program called Delicious. At Delicious.com you can search for websites with keywords, called tags, and organize lists of favourites URLs.

I'm curious about reducing a book to a list of single keywords. As a librarian, I'm used to a controlled list of hierarchical subjects. This site is organized by random keywords supplied by the users. (That's not a judgement- I'm a big fan of randomness!) I'm going to try to boil down some happy book club choices to keywords...

Here are some happy nonfiction books:

The City of Falling Angels / John Berendt
Venice Italy Fenice opera arson characters MidnightintheGardenofGoodandEvil glassblower

Dropped Threads: What we aren't told / edited by Carol Shields
Essays women Canada young old discussion personal popular accessible

Outliers : The Story of Success / Malcolm Gladwell
Tippingpoint Blink success practice 10,000hours thoughtprovoking easyread

The Perfection of the Morning : An Apprenticeship in Nature / Sharon Butala
meditative nature lyrical Saskatchewan mixedreaction ranching spiritual nonlinear

Eat, Pray, Love / Elizabeth Gilbert
travel Italy India Indonesia Bali spiritual funny diary anecdotal easyread


I'm having a hard time describing what these books are about! How do I describe the mixed love/hate reaction of our book club to Sharon Butala's Perfection of the Morning? I like that you can include different information than the usual subjects you find in the library catalogue, like tone and read alikes. But, for my book reviews, I think I'll stick to sentences!


It makes me wonder about group think. If many people like a website, will I like it too? Do the tagging decisions of millions of people cause the best content to rise to the top? That's how I pick videos to watch on Youtube. Can I trust strangers, or might they have a business interest in what they're promoting? Sometimes word of mouth causes a book to expolode, and everyone reads it. Will digital word of mouth explode?

Delicious is a good place to keep track of your personal or work websites, but not the place to search for book reviews. At least not yet! Happy reading.