Embracing Web 2.0: Social Bookmarking

A study by Ida Rosenthal

Source: http://www.frontiernet.net/

The Web 2.0 Movement

• Web 2.0 is the second generation of web development and web design with a focus on:

communication information sharing collaboration user-centered design two-way interactions

What is Social Bookmarking (SB)?

• SB is a method for users to store, organize, and search, bookmarks of web pages on the Internet

Most social bookmarking services allow users to organize bookmarks with informal metadata, usually called tags

What kind of info can we find?• Social bookmarking URLs are full of new and

fresh information

• Delicious has little redundancy in page info for ~50% of URLs and high redundancy for ~20%

• Tags are pretty accurate % of Tags Users Found Irrelevant:  7% % of Tags Users Found Subjective:  <5%

Who’s Who in Social Bookmarking

Digg.com

Considered the #1 SB website1

1 "Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites| June 2009." The eBusiness Knowledgebase. June 2009. EBizMBA. 15 June 2009 <http://www.ebizMBA.com/articles/social-bookmarking>.

2 Arrington, Michael. "Feature Overview of Delicious 2.0." TechCrunch. Sept. 2007. 16 June 2009 <http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/06/exclusive-screen-shots-and-featureoverview-of delicious-20-preview/>. 3 The eBusiness Knowledgebase

Flickr.comPrimarily hosts image

and video content

Delicious.comHas more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs2; it’s the 6th most popular SB website.3

Stumbleupon.comPersonalized recommendation engine; “channel-surfing”

Reddit.com

Like Digg, allows users to rank links, causing them to become more/less popular

Diigo.comAllows users to highlight web pages, attach sticky notes & share annotations

The Tragedy of Ma.gnolia

• Ma.gnolia.com was a popular SB website that launched in 2006

Largest rival to Digg and Delicious

• Owners maintained the hosting themselves

• Lost half a terabyte of data Lost most primary files and backup too Data corruption

• closed early 2009 w/ plans to reopen late 2009

Advantages

Public Both Private (w/n OCGR)

1. Ppl can find & bookmark web pages that haven’t

been noticed by automated computer programs

1. More intuitive (“human touch”)

1. Information gathered from rankings useful web metric

2. allows for exploration and more browsing

2. automatically generates “related”

tags

2. Consolidates bookmarks from various computers and share

bookmarks with contacts

3. Makes users more comfortable with content

3. allows users to quickly share news about events in real

time

3. search engines will discover the link to the page each time it is

posted at one of the social bookmarking sites

DisadvantagesPublic Both Private (w/n OCGR)

(1) spammers have started bookmarking the same web page

multiple times a lot of (unrelated) popular

tags

(1) mistagging errors can be

extensive

(1) no mechanism to indicate hierarchical

relationships between tags

(2) SB can be distracting and

confusing

(2) no mechanism to indicate

hierarchical relationships

between tags

(2) Catch-22: You cannot get the links if people can't find you, and people can't find you without the links.

What Isn’t Gonna Work?• Some SB sites don’t meet OCGR’s needs

on a public or private level:

• examines technology-related topics

• similar design to Digg, but not as user-friendly

• “channel-surfing”

• more for entertainment and random discovery

• does not support articles or documents

• exclusively photographs and images

Let’s “Digg” In!• Cornerstone function: Voting stories up and down

“digging” and “burying”, respectively

Very user-friendly most popular SB website

• only the most “Dugg” stories appear on the front page

• Allows user to easily identify information as an article, video, or picture

•No tags

• Allows for the user to add friends to a network

Cannot organize friends into smaller clusters

Difficult to organize personal bookmarks

It’s Delicious (.com)!• Previously known as del.icio.us

five million users & 150 M bookmarked URLs

• has a "hotlist" on its home page additional "popular" and "recent" pages help make the

site a conveyor of internet trends

Allows for the user to add friends to a network; also allows network bundles (smaller groups)

Allows “tag bundles” to organize a group of tags Eg. "cats", "dogs" and "fish" tags may all be put into a

bundle called "pets”

• "Diigo" is an abbreviation for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff“

• Similar to Delicious with several extra features:

– Allows users to highlight sections, attach sticky notes & share these annotations

• private, public, or viewable only by members of a certain group

– Group tag dictionary to enforce tagging consistency – A group administrator can define a set of

recommended tags to help make tagging consistent

• Smallest amount of users

Recommendation• Digg is best for public use because it has

the largest amount of users

• Delicious is the best combination of both public and private use, though it doesn’t fully meet the needs of either

• Diigo is best for private use and collaborative efforts within OCGR

Questions?

Thank You.