Delicious Numbers

I'm working on a mini-paper that examines my usage of the social bookmarking tool, Delicious. I've blogged before (Quality Ingredients Make Bookmarks Delicious) on my great love and admiration for Delicious. Beyond that, I haven't really put the microscope - or calculator - to my usage.

I assembled a few of my usage stats which I think reveals patterns to my behaviour. They may be of interest only to me, but I do think they qualify me as a power user.

My Delicious Stats:

• Months of membership: 47
• Bookmarks: 3475
• Average bookmarks per month: 74
  
• Tags: 698
• Tags used only once: 95 (I like highly-specific tags, but clearly I need to prune)
  
• Untagged bookmarks: 14 (some how I missed these as I always try to find some tag)
  
• Tag Bundles: 16
  
• Unbundled tags: 20 (haven't rounded up the scragglers for awhile)
  
• Average number of tags in a bundle: 59 (range is from 7 to 281)
  
• Users in my network: 20 (I don't network very much)
• My fans: 8 (no one appreciates my genius)
• #1 tag: "net news" with 637 bookmarks (I use it for my news feed here on the right)
• #2 tag: "web accessibility", 208 (a research interest and subject of my MA thesis)
• #3 tag: "Toronto", 204 (I love my city)
• #4 tag: "web 2.0", 177 (even I'm sick of this term)
• #5 tag: "Internet" 140

In the past six months:

• Bookmarks: 421
• Average bookmarks per month: 70
• Range: 43 (February) to 121 (June - all the Foursquare research)
  
• Average number of days I bookmarked per month: 13
• Average number of bookmarks per month based on days I bookmarked: 5.2
• Average number of bookmarks per month overall: 2.3

I did a historical cross-section of the past four Mays (no special reason for selecting May) that I've been a member:

• Bookmarks for Mays: 219
  
• Average bookmarks per May: 55
  
• Range: 4 (2007) to 126 (2008)
  
• Average number of days I bookmarked per May: 10
• Average number of bookmarks per month based on days I bookmarked: 4.3
  
• Average number of bookmarks per May day overall: 1.8

I wanted to figure out my use of tags per bookmark and how many other people were bookmarking resources I bookmarked. This was time-consuming to determine, so I selected one month, April 2010, that seemed to be average in that I had no special activities or projects that month:

• Average number of tags used per resource: 2.09
• Range of number of tags used: 1 to 5
• Average number of people that bookmarked a resource I did: 83
• Range of number of people bookmarking: 0 to 1990 (the latter for Shape Collage)
  
• Number of times I was the only person ever to bookmark a resource: 26 (out of 70 for the month)
  

I also tried to examine my bookmarking for personal versus professional usage but it was too difficult to neatly classify many of them.

It appears that my usage really fluctuates depending on current projects I have or events. It does appear that I bookmark approximately once every three days and that when I do I tend to bookmark 5 items using 2 tags each. Apparently, I also bookmark a fair number of resources that no one else has found (or cares about).

And finally...

• My bookmarks using "Delicious": 24
• My bookmarks using "glenfarrelly": 68
  

On Tags and Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of Folksonomies

In the last few years, the practice of tagging resources on the World Wide Web has become a more popular activity, due in part to the success of websites that feature tagging functionality prominently, such as del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, CiteULike, and LibraryThing. These websites allow the collection and sharing of bookmarks, photographs, blog postings, academic papers, and books respectively, and tagging is a key method to enable retrieval and sharing within these sites. Delicious offers the best description of tags and tagging, and this description can be extended beyond bookmarks to a general definition:

Tags are one-word [or multiple words written without spaces or with underscores] descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us to help you organize and remember them. Tags are a little bit like keywords, but they're chosen by you, and they do not form a hierarchy. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like…This is great for organizing and finding personal data, but it goes even further when someone else posts related content using the same tags. You begin building a collaborative repository of related information, driven by personal interests and creative organization. (del.icio.us)

Tagging information as a practice existed prior to these websites popularizing it, but these websites were among the first to extend the practice beyond the domain of content creators or information specialists to the general public (Weinberger, 2007, p. 92). When tagging is done by the public, it is often known as a folksonomy (globeandmail.com)

For an understanding of how folksonomies work, or often do not work, the academic tradition of semiotics offers help to “understand what goes into a message…[it] also help[s] to understand how the message comes to have meaning” (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008, p. 105) Through a semiotic analysis of the characteristics of folksonomies, I will explore three main difficulties inherent to them. Despite these difficulties, they are emerging as a popular new form of communication in line with the more fluid notions of meaning consistent with the post-structuralist notion of semiotics. The characteristics to be examined are that, first, folksonomies’ collective nature facilitates open meaning, second, that tagging for the self results in confusing connotations, and third, that there is a lack of message coding (in the semiotic sense). Prior to discussing these characteristics, however, I will provide background information about the problems inherent to the use of folksonomies, and insight on how semiotics provides a useful conceptual tool to examine them.

Problem with Folksonomies

The practice of tagging is useful as a personal means to organize data and as a mnemonic device for one’s own retrieval. Indeed, it was originally for this use that Joshua Schachter created del.icio.us (Weinberger, 2007, p. 162). When one moves beyond the personal uses for tagging, however, to the social aspects, the utility of tagging becomes more problematic. There are essentially two levels of complications: 1) people’s tags may be difficult for others to understand, 2) people may have tagged items inappropriately for others’ needs. A good example of this problem was a recent search of Flickr for photos of Hawaii. In addition to the expected images of beaches and volcanoes, one also gets, among the top results, a picture of a couple at an outdoor restaurant (presumably located in Hawaii) and a close-up of a lizard (also presumably located in Hawaii). Another example of tagging difficulties arises in a scan of the most popular tags at del.icio.us, revealing some more meaningful tags (youtube, tv, psychology), but others that are puzzling (toread, fic, ubuntu, fun). People are participating in folksonomies, but not always doing it in a manner that is useful to others.

Use of semiotics

Semiotics is the “study of signs” (Littlejohn & Foss, 2008, p. 35) and tags are definitely signs. Using a triadic structure of a sign with a signifier, that is the “material dimension of the sign,” a signified, “the cultural or conceptual dimension,” and the referent “the real thing in the world,” the structure of a folksonomy sign can be broken down (Black, 2007a, p. 5):

1. signifier = a word or single term that is a link appearing on a webpage
2. signified = what that word link represents to the user, i.e. an expectation of resources on that topic
3. referent = the actual resources that have been tagged with that word, at that point in time

Examining folksonomies through this semiotic structure initially reveals one of the fundamental difficulties with folksonomies, that is, the referent is almost always unknown to the user until he or she clicks through. Often with signs, there is a clear or discernible referent, yet folksonomies, by their very nature, are a complete mystery to the user, making a single, clear meaning unlikely.

Another problematic element is that current technology and practice do not disambiguate the multiple senses one signifier may have (for example, synonyms such as: asp, the programming language and asp, the snake of Cleopatra fame) or to join multiple signifiers sharing the same signified (for example, blog, blogs, weblog). Morville believes that folksonomies are thus fundamentally flawed due to their inability to “handle equivalence, hierarchy, and other semantic relationships caus[ing] them to fail miserably at any significant scale” (as cited inWeinberger, 2007, p. 166). However, Weinberger believes that computers, possibly via artificial intelligence, will eventually address some elements of ambiguity in folksonomies (Weinberger, 2007, p. 166).
For Saussure, a founder of semiotic theory, “the meanings of a sign were fixed socially by convention and, thus, were independent of any consequential variation in interpretation” (Danesi, 1999, p. 11). Yet, consequential variation in interpretation is often widespread with folksonomies, indicating that the meaning offered by tag signs is more complicated, compared to other uses of signs.

Sign o' The Times

I've been term paper oblivion for the last few days. I have a big, weighty term paper due for all of my three classes, while I don't dislike my classes, I certainly don't find two of the three final assignments at all helpful.

The one assignment I am excited about is using semiotics to help understand folksonomies and/or social bookmarking. I chose semiotics as I previously hated it (as mentioned in an earlier post) and thought this would be a cool way to grow as a person and researcher. How foolish I was!

I don't know if I'll have anything earth-shattering to say about it, but once it's complete - and if I don't fail - I'll post it (or highlights) here.

In the meantime, for those asking me what semiotics or folksonomies are, here are some good short primers I found on YouTube.

Intro to Semiotics


Intro to Social Bookmarking and Folksonomies

Quality Ingredients Make Bookmarks Del.icio.us

It has been one year today since I started using del.icio.us. Despite extolling its virtues ever since to everyone I know, I've stirred up little interest (foolish mortals not grasping the potential of social bookmarking & folksonomies!).

Until, coincidentally, yesterday when a friend, Glenna, (even the name is a coincidence) asked me about del.icio.us (little did she know what she was begetting).

Del.icio.us is my favourite web application and I keep finding more reasons to love it - and you will too if you read on and sample it.

Del.icio.us is a free web-based bookmarking service founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003, but was bought out by Yahoo.

Rotten old style bookmarks
While I have always loved bookmarking, it has a lot of limitations when done via one’s browser. I use the web a lot at home and at work and there was no practical way to share bookmarks, nor access them on the road. Another problem is that avid surfers and information hoarders, such as myself, quickly outgrew efforts at even the best attempts at classifications schemes via folders, subfolders and subsubfolders. Also, bookmarks could only appear in one folder (unless you bookmarked the same page twice) so you had to remember your filing convention.

It's del.icio.us!
The main difference with del.icio.us is that you tag a webpage with terms that you specify. Tags are keywords related to the webpage. Getting used to tags is not hard. You only need one tag per bookmark but can have as many as you want. Not sure how to tag a page - del.icio.us gives you suggestions on what others have tagged it. That's all you need to do.

Top things you can do with del.icio.us:

Cool stuff for the bookmarker
1. Import your existing browser bookmarks
2. Buttons can be added to your browser, so it's quick to use
3. Add comments or summaries to each bookmark
4. View bookmarks in your browser via downloadable del.ico.us toolbar
5. Back-up or export your bookmarks
6. Bundle tags to organize bookmarks into meaningful groups
7. Hide your dirty little secrets via “do not share” option
8. Search your and/or others' bookmarks
9. Create separate accounts for different things (eg. work vs personal)
10. Share an account with your work team or association for easy info sharing
11. Each tag you use has a unique url, so you can link directly to it (say I want to share my findings about Internet culture, here's the link)

Cool stuff for the social networker
12. Share directly with friends using del.icio.us via one click
13. Build a network of friends and bookmarkers you admire and monitor what they're up to
14. See who else bookmarked the same obscure site, look them up, and bond
15. Add del.icio.us' Facebook application to share with your Facebook friends

Cool stuff for the website manager
16. Add a del.icio.us button or link to your page/blog to encourage people to bookmark you
17. Learn who’s bookmarking your site and what pages specifically – also see the tags your users find applicable to you, which can be a real eye opener

Cools stuff for the Internet publisher or blogger
18. Syndicate your bookmarks - your bookmarks & your tags have individual feeds built in (using RSS) so people can subscribe to the feed in their readers
19. Automate the publishing of your tag(s) using the feeds (as I'm doing with the Net News on the right)
20. Publish your work account's bookmarks on your intranet
21. Copyright your bookmarks (you own them, not Yahoo) using Creative Commons

Cool stuff for searchers & researchers
22. Find people interested in the same topic as you and check out their bookmarks
23. Add value to the web, as tags help indicate what a webpage is really about, eventually technologies will be able to use these tags to help improve search engines (ie. semantic web)
24. Create custom tags to help research and micro-organizing (in gearing up for my graduate research, I started tags for Internet_theory, Internet_history, Internet_politics, Internet_journalism, etc.)
25. Subscribe to tags of your choosing and see updates in one spot
26. Check out the homepage for what's hot and recent in the community

Other cool stuff
27. Create a tag for yourself and keep track of all the online stuff related to you (or me)
28. Get gifts you want by bookmarking your favourite stuff with the tag “wishlist” and when someone wants to know what to get you send them this link (this was del.icio.us' own tip, but its the best!)

Not so tasty
One of the biggest problems with del.icio.us is that tags have to be one word. A further limitation is that all spelling variations of the tag are counted as unique tags (so you’ll see social_bookmarking, socialbookmarking, social_bookmarks and they are all treated as separate). While it’s great to be able to use the same tags as the larger community, your tags need to be readable to you, so find a convention you find useful and stick to it (for instance, I like to capitalize proper nouns and I like multiple words separated with underscores rather than compounded). It also doesn’t handle synonyms well (eg. I want to bookmark sites to order cookies to eat and sites discussing website cookies).

There are also a lot of competitors, but none as popular. I've tried StumbleUpon but haven't got into it. Yahoo MyWeb (why they launched a competitor to their own company is beyond me) has a cool feature that let’s you store a copy of the webpage despite what seems like copyright violation.

Here’s a helpful page to begin: http://del.icio.us/help/saving

Once you're on del.icio.us, be sure to add me to your network.

Forgive me my Web. 2.0 trespasses

I can't help myself but I stumbled upon this great article on Web 2.0 by Jared M. Spool called "Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype".

He describes the excitement Web 2.0 engenders:

The speed and ease at which these new applications were built is what is getting us very excited about the potential of the Web 2.0 world. Evocative of Dr. Frankenstein building a monster in his attic laboratory using body pieces he found lying around his neighborhood, people with a little skill can create new applications using common elements found lying around the Web in almost no time at all. As the skill requirements for building these applications are decreasing, we think this opens a whole new world of possibilities.

The article lays out the foundation technologies and principles of Web 2.0, such as:

• open APIs (Application Programming Interfaces)
• RSS (site syndication)
  
• folksonomies (individuals classification of information based on their own words and tagging)
• social networking
  

Developers not confined by having to recreate the wheel, can focus on building cool new applications. Then a community of users can help build, develop and grow these applications faster than any one programmer could even dream of.

The article closes with a caution with a reference appealing to Webslinger:

As Spiderman's Uncle Ben pointed out, "With great power comes great responsibility." Just because we can do all these things doesn't mean we should do them. In the early 1980's, the cheap availability of laser printers and digital fonts produced a plethora of documents that more resembled ransom notes than professional publications. We could easily imagine designers going wild with the capabilities of this new technology and not using the restraint necessary to ensure they produce an optimal experience.

I remember those print-outs and combined with clip art, it was a scary time indeed. Hope it doesn't ever get that bad.