The Copenhagen Project

del.icio.us is a social bookmarking service with tagging at the center of it’s functionality. It’s a useful tool for an individual to organize and remember items on the web, and it has some interesting aspects of social sharing.

What it is

del.icio.us users can save links to pieces of information from around the web to their personal accounts. By taking advantage of tagging, users can add associative words to each item for later finding. The saved bookmarks are either public or private.

The service has a built-in network function where users can connect to each other and thereby follow bookmarked items from other people. Bookmarks can be exported and retrieved through RSS or automatically pushed to a daily blog posting.

Another thing worth mentioning is the total saves count. Each bookmark has a counter, that shows how many times the item has been saved in total by del.icio.us users. del.icio.us uses this feature to promote saved items to it’s front page, and thereby has a Digg-like functionality.

Context and perspectives

del.icio.us does in a way provide access to context and other perspectives. It’s not based on the saved items themselves, but on the associated tags. When I bookmarked the recently released WordPress theme CommentPress, I used different words to describe it:

commentpress wordpress plugin blog annotation books collaboration tools comments

If I want to get back to it again, all I need to do is ask del.icio.us to show me the items from my account that are tagged with one or more of these word, e.g. wordpress and annotation.

What’s interesting is that anytime I’m looking at the results of a specific tag request, I can choose to view all items saved at del.icio.us with the same tags. Using the two tags from above, del.icio.us gives me this list. By moving through other people’s bookmarks, I discover items that may be associated with my own.

In this example I found another system for paragraph level commenting. By combining some of the other keywords, I also found interesting blog posts and discussions that would be hard to find by searching through Google.

These functions are not really a built-in feature of del.icio.us, but rather ways to utilize the system. Functionality like this could probably be enhanced and combined with other tools to provide this service more directly to the user.

Meaning creation and action

When bookmarking, the user has the option to describe the item in maximum 255 characters, so there’s not much room for reflective thoughts that could benefit other users. Also, there’s no comment function.

Conclusion

del.icio.us is a useful tool for personal bookmarking. The service has never been meant to be a tool for staying up to date, but it works quite well as a way to monitor what people in one’s network is focusing on. Also it can be used in interesting ways to find context and perspectives based on tags.

The tagging and sharing process as a whole can - with improvements - probably be put to some interesting uses in context of e.g. crowd powered blog monitoring.

Further reading

• Social Bookmarking Tools (I) - A general review in D-Lib Magazine.

  “In many ways these new tools resemble blogs stripped down to the bare essentials. Here the essential unit of information is a link, not a story – but a link decorated with a title, a description, tags and perhaps even personal recommendation points. It is still uncertain whether tagging will take off in the way that blogging has. And even if it does, nobody yet knows exactly what it will achieve or where it will go – but the road ahead beckons.”

• How the Internet Disorganizes Everything at 10 Zen Monkeys. Interview with David Weinberger.

  “The internet disorganizes information for you, so you can organize it for yourself — alone or with friends. That is the distilled essence of David Weinberger’s theory about how we create meaning and understanding for ourselves in these times.”

• Understanding Taxonomy and Folksonmy Together at Personal InfoCloud.

  “I am continually finding organizations are thinking the social bookmarking tools and folksonomy are going to be simple and a cure all, but it is much more complicated than that. The social bookmarking tools will really sing for a while, but then things need help and most of the tools out there are not to the point of providing that assistance yet.”

• A cognitive analysis of tagging at Rashmi Sinha’s weblog.

  “To conclude, the beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability.”