I hadn't even heard of del.icio.us until I read your proposal, Ericka. It's a really exciting project, that's for sure. I was curious to see how many people provided detailed descriptions of the links, but it seems the system relies more on the quantity of people who look at the same link. I was thinking, though, that there may be "link in-breeding." For instance, if 200 people are linked to a hacking article, then everyone else might also venture there and bookmark it. The really great article with only 2 links doesn't get any attention! :-)

I also like the slant of your study. Indeed, how many people are using the system to self-promote?

One thing you might do to attract more attention to your post is spend more time in your proposal describing del.icio.us. I didn't know what it was (had no clue) and had to travel to the site to get some background. A few sentences ought to suffice. Then again, maybe I'm just out of the loop and everyone else is totally familiar with the system! :-(

Thanks for the comments. I did assume familiarity with the system so I'll add a brief description. Maybe a link to this introductory movie by Jon Udell will work in that capacity.

As a relatively new (couple of weeks) user of del.icio.us, I look forward to reading about your pilot study, Ericka. For me, the degree to which other people have bookmarked the pages I have is not something that has affected my use of the service.

The principal appeal of the del.icio.us to me is the ability to apply multiple tags to bookmarks, so that I can find information using any number of keywords or categories.

I have found, however, that seeing who else has linked to the same things I have offers some rewards. For example, while creating bookmarks for sites related to learning Indonesian, I explored a collection of bookmarks from someone who had tagged one of the same sites I did. There I found a link to a free language-learning course I wasn't aware of. It was a great find, and now that I've finally finished setting up my (nearly 700) bookmarks, I plan to do more exploring of other people's collections.

Best,

Walt

Part of me did wonder, has he been living under a rock? :-P Seriously though, I do think it's a good idea to provide a little background on del.icio.us for those who aren't familiar with it. It's just that, knowing you as I do, Matt (with the Slashdot-reading and the wiki-ing and the...glavin glavin), I was a little surprised you hadn't heard of it.

Ericka, interesting questions you raise. How social can it be when all you have are the bookmarks? It makes me think of Napster, when you could look at a given user's library and chat with him or her, which I used to do sometimes. With del.icio.us (and de.lirio.us as well), I don't believe users can create profiles displaying contact information like on FOAF sites (Friendster, etc.), so as far as I know there's no way to talk to fellow users unless they make some kind of special effort, such as linking to a personal home page and putting something like "This is my site with my contact info if you'd like to get in touch with me" in the description.

I'll confess to having browsed some people's del.icio.us and de.lirio.us sites before and thinking "how boring!" if all they have up there are links like "Yahoo! Mail" and CNN.com. It makes me think they're missing the "social bookmarking" "folksonomy" point and they might as well just use their browsers' bookmark feature. But then again I guess it's a way to be able to access one's bookmarks from any computer.

Also, speaking as a de.lirio.us user myself, it might be interesting to include de.lirio.us users in the study too, just to see if there's any difference. De.lirio.us is a smaller community with what seems to be a higher open source geek population.

CultureCat

I'm often surprised by how much people think I know but don't. I'm also surprised by how much other people know that I don't. :-) Just last night I was on Slashdot and then Free Software Magazine and kept reading about someone named Maureen O'Grady and Pamela Jones. I'm like, "Eh? Who dem?" After a couple hours Googlin' and Wikiped'ian I finally put the puzzle together and learned about Groklaw and SCO. Of course I'd heard people say "Groklaw" before and mention it, but I'd never really bothered to learn much about it other than it apparently existed. I definitely hadn't heard of Maureen and while I knew there were Linux magazines, I didn't know their names and have never scanned one (though I'd guess there would have to be a "Linux World" magazine). All that effort paid off. Now when somebody mentions this I can say "Just because somebody has Watchtower magazines in their backseat doesn't mean anything" or something like that and actually sound like I'm up on the issues.

I excuse my ignorance the same way Steven Sample does. Other people learn about Groklaw and what's going on with Marcy and Pamela. I'm more likely to re-read the Prince or Plato's Republic. I'm a block of sedimentary rock on the bottom of a swiftly flowing stream, not a duck swimming on top of it. Or something like that, I'm sure.

Beyond the scope of what you're doing, I know, but I just noticed that CiteULike (a tag system for academic essays and books similar to del.icio.us and de.lirio.us) has a discussion list. That would be interesting to study. :-)

CultureCat

I saw this on Slashdot today and thought it might interest you.

Looks like a good overview.