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
  

Two Journal Articles of Mine Published

Last month, two essays I wrote about Internet topics for Royal Road classes were published in journals. Researching Delicious and Rotten Tomatoes (see below) was a blast and proved a fertile source for a lot of interesting stuff. Hopefully as my academic careers progresses, I'll be able to continue to write and publish on Internet topics.

I was just accepted into University of Toronto's Faculty of Information PhD program, so I think I'll have the venue and opportunity for some cool research (stay tuned).

Here are the journal article links and abstracts:

Does Rotten Tomatoes Spoil Users? Examining Whether Social Media Features Foster Participatory Culture

Participatory culture existed prior to the advent of the World Wide Web. Now, due to the increasing popularity of social media tools, participatory culture is flourishing online as well. One popular movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes, demonstrates this trend. The website includes a suite of interactive, social media tools. Based on an ethnographic observation, participatory culture was seen to be occurring on the site. The power of the website to provide an open and accessible means of cultural dialogue and to encourage civic participation can be observed particularly when online user activity moves beyond discussions of film aesthetics to encompass larger societal and cultural issues. However, despite the site’s intriguing potential, there are various flaws observed that prevent a greater flourishing of participatory culture.

On Tags and Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of Folksonomies

The practice of tagging resources on the Internet has become a popular activity on such websites as Delicious, Flickr, Technorati, CiteULike, and LibraryThing, making tagging a key method to enable online information retrieval and sharing. When tagging is done by members of the general public, it is known as a folksonomy. Folksonomies, unlike many other forms of communication, are created by individuals acting in isolation from one another and with no coordinated effort. Yet when the individual practice of tagging resources is shared openly difficulties in meaning arise, due in part to the lack of sufficient message coding and ambiguous connotations.

Delicious Gets Even Tastier With Age

It's been two years today since I started using del.icio.us and my love for the site continues to grow! Read my prior posts on the joys of the site & social bookmarking in general.

This anniversary is well timed as the web service has just been relaunched, and happily I'll never have to type that name with all the weird punctuation again as the site is now just Delicious.

The new features are mainly along the lines of increased performance, improved search, and a new design. Others have written about the changes, so rather than add to the noise on the issue, here are my Delicious bookmarks on this topic.

Delicious has always had a simplicity of design that made it a breeze to use. Things have changed a bit and like any redesign it takes old users some getting used to. But overall, it seems that things are much easier and quicker to use now. (My only beef so far, is it's now much harder to bundle unbundled tags.) It also looks classier too - less like a mess of plain text as it did before.

Considering how much I love Delicious and that it seems to be getting better, you'd think I'd be happy. But a few nights ago, I lay in bed dreading that as Delicious still doesn't seem to have a viable model for making money it could shut down. My nightmare with Delicious is Yahoo (owner of Delicious) will do what they did when they shut down Yahoo Photos and encouraged me to move my photos to Flickr. Yahoo Photos, unlike Flickr, was a great free service. Yahoo Photos let me host tons of photos and organize them into albums, etc. With Flickr, after importing all my Yahoo Photos pix there, I was horrified to learn that my old photos were now locked away from me and I can only view the most recent 200 unless I pay. I also have to pay to create more than 3 albums. Flickr basically sucks now, so I have moved onto PhotoBucket. But my old photos are dead to me on Flickr. I hope Yahoo doesn't one day do this to my Delicious bookmarks. Photos are nice to look at, but I can't live without my bookmarks!