OK, so it's not hard to guess what first grabbed my attention about this task: bonjour, Otter Group!
I thought it was interesting to explore around del.icio.us and track thought processes through tags. I enjoyed noticing where I felt the train of thought was "on topic" and where I felt I was definitely veering into other topics. For instance, I started out exploring the "food" tag, which led me to "recipes," then "vegan" where I noticed a bookmark for a site about vegan shoes. So, a couple of tags kept me solidly within the "food" topic and then led me into fashion accessories!
I also like to note the tags and try to imagine whether the "tagger" was just trying to be very thorough or if the tags represent what topics are most important to them for a site. I looked at the tags for a site that had a lemon tart recipe, and it was fun to see how many folks stuck to basics like "dessert" and "recipe" and those who were more specific and tagged "lemon." A simple example, but it made me think about how personalized this tool might be, and how that might really work well for some searchers and be really distracting for others. I liked seeing tags in other languages, too!
I peeked at another string of "web 2.0" and "web design" tags, just to get a perspective from a different topic. I can see some research use for del.icio.us if you view the common tags for a bookmark. In this instance, the common cloud I viewed contained tags like "javascript" and "css," so I can see where a searcher could use the common clouds as ways to narrow down choices for sites, based on whether a site is tagged for all of the topics you are searching or just one or two - a bit like I imagine "relevancy ranking" to work behind the scenes at Google.
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