What our Del.icio.us says about us.

I was looking at our del.icio.us bookmarks this morning, and I was flabbergasted at the diversity of topics that are being talked about in our blogosphere. The tags go from “Best Friends” to “Books” to “Abuse” to “Making a Movie” to “Middle School Romance” and everywhere in between. As I was looking at these community-centered topics, I realized that this is who we are. These things are what we are thinking about. This is what we are interested in. Now, this list is by no means complete, but I believe it will become the visual representation of the Discovery team. Anyone who wants to learn more about who we are and what we are about shouldn’t read about our demographics; they shouldn’t analyze our test scores. It is all right here in our del.icio.us account. We are unafraid to talk about love. We aren’t bashful about liking funny movies. We like to make lists and explain them. These things are digital artifacts of our identity.

When we started blogging at the beginning of this year, I knew that each one of you would develop an online identity, a persona that would be the budding writer, making comments and creating new work. Yet, I had no idea that we would also be forging a collective identity, or more appropriately, a collaborative identity. We now have the power to show the world just what we can be as writers. We can show off the best of collective self. With just a few tags, we can change the way that people see us and access our pulled-together thoughts. So, I guess what I am trying to say is that I think our del.icio.us account is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is us.