"A classified and hierarchically ordered set of pluralities, of variants, has none of the sting of the miscellaneous and uncoordinated plurals of our actual world." (Dewey, 1926)

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Attributed to Pablo Picasso)

Among all of the billions of web sites, which ones are popular now? What do people find useful within a particular subject? What have colleagues or friends found that is useful to them online? Google can give you an idea of what link creators think with its PageRank system, which counts a link to a particular site as a vote for that site, but PageRank is a proprietary and complex algorithm so it is not clear exactly how the results are determined. Only link creators get to vote, and you can only find what you are searching for. If you want an overview of what is new or interesting on the web, in a particular subject area, or to a particular person you might go to a social bookmarking system (SBS).

Del.icio.us (hereafter delicious) is a service that allows users to store links for free using its web-based system. It launched in December 2003 as the first social bookmarks system, and in April 2005 had about 90,000 registered users (Schachter, April 7, 2005). The links on delicious can be imported, exported, redirected to other web pages, integrated with a web browser, and more. The service uses open standards and appeals to a technologically savvy user base that can and does repurpose the data (see http://pchere.blogspot.com/2005/02/absolutely-delicious-complete-tool.ht...). Users tag their links, and this allows for collective lists of tags to emerge serendipitously and purposefully.

In an SBS users can import their bookmarks and save new ones directly to the system. They can also classify them using "tags" and add their own descriptions. Tags are like folders, but one bookmark can have several tags and there is no (or not much) hierarchy or nesting. To see this process in action see this Flash movie by Jon Udell.

Why do people want to keep their bookmarks online? Some reasons may be that many people use different computers at home, work, and traveling, so online storage facilitates a single repository. Also, bookmarks are not very useful when offline, so online storage is not a barrier. It also facilitates sharing of bookmarks. People then tag the bookmarks to make it easier for them to find again, and in some cases, to share with others also interested in the category that the tag describes.

Classification is distributed among all users in an SBS and this seem to be significantly different from other types of classification systems we have relied upon in the past. In SBS classification is global and grass roots (non-expert) based. Today's SBS users seem to be early technology adopters, and, as with any internet population are more likely to be from industrialized nations and more educated. Del.icio.us was the first SBS which came online in late 2003. Many similar systems exist today (for example, Furl, Spurl and del.irio.us).

Why has tagging caught on? Assigning metadata has never been a popular activity. Metadata is simply data about data, but it can take many forms, from structured to faceted to folk. The tags used in SBS are a folk type of metadata. One article suggests that tagging has caught on because of the "tight feedback loop" (Udell, 2004). On delicious the assignment of tags is immediately visible so that users can view how he or she has used the tag and how every user has used the tag.

Another reason could be that tags are also useful because new annotated links can be immediately routed to other systems (such as a blog, an aggregator, another web site) based on the tag name, by user, by popularity, or other criteria. A commonly used set of protocols that facilitate re-presentation of the annotated links on delicious are called web syndication feeds (also known as RDF, RSS and ATOM). Applications that read these feeds are called aggregators and they present the feeds in many different formats. Each user can choose a different aggregator that meets his or her needs. Aggregators are beginning to be built into operating systems such as Macintosh OS 10.4 Tiger's Safari web browser.

If SBS remain popular they could provide a powerful site of surveillance for corporate and government interests, or the flexible and democratic systems could continue to evade such uses and provide valuable services. The future is likely between these extremes. It is important to determine the basic nature of the systems as they exist today so that the designers of such systems, who are both the users and administrators, can move forward with a clearer picture of their impact beyond the technical and toward the social.

I performed a pilot study survey of del.icio.us users for a graduate course in research methods. The survey focused on the feedback users received and how that effected their system use. This study allowed me to assess the method used and gather a limited amount of preliminary data. I will be expanding on this initial research for my master's thesis.