Participation Literacy

I use several computers and several Web browsers. Every time I am trying to access a Web site with a non guessable URL and bad googlebility, I feel lost in a world without reason. The World Wide Web can be extremely difficult to navigate in. The first time I used Delicious was early in 2004. Delicious was maximum 6 months old by then, and I did not really study it enough, so I could not see its advantages. It did not seem as smooth as my browser bookmarks, even though I never found those. When I returned to Delicious in the middle of 2005, everything came together. Now it seemed to suit me perfectly.

Delicious was created by Joshua Schachter and came online in late 2003. The site is a social bookmarking Web service for storing and sharing Web bookmarks:

About text:

del.icio.us is a collection of favorites - yours and everyone else’s. Use del.icio.us to:* Keep links to your favorite articles, blogs, music, restaurant reviews, and more on del.icio.us and access them from any computer on the web.

* Share favorites with friends, family, and colleagues.

* Discover new things. Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite - they’ve already done the work of finding it. Explore and enjoy.

“Everything on del.icio.us is someone’s favorite”, is a powerful statement. Of course, it is only true in a semantic sense. Every tagged page is a favorite if you call these database posts of Web pages favorites. I use the word bookmark, since a few of my “bookmarks” are truly my favorites. A bookmark is a way of marking a page so that I can easily return to it. A great many of my bookmarks are far from favorites, but still I think it is important to remember the Web site and be able to return to it if I need or want to.

The figure is showing a screen capture from my (former) user page at Delicious. The page is similar to the main page with the difference that the main page is a compilation of all users’ bookmarks instead of just mine. As you can see in the banner, they contradict themselves when it comes to the terminology for their most important word. Here they call the bookmarks “bookmarks” and not “favorites”, as in the about text. It might be because they want to address both Firefox etc. and Internet Explorer users. It might also be that they actually se their bookmarks as some kind of favorite Web pages and not just as “remember-marks”.

This view contains my bookmarks. My username is (or rather was) socialnavicreation. The URL to my delicious page is http://del.icio.us/socialnavicreation. This page is open for everyone. It is like my own Web page, the difference being that I have no power over the layout or anything else besides which bookmarks and tags it contains.

For every bookmark you see the title, the tags belonging to it, the date it was created and how many other people have bookmarked this page. For example “Ontology of Folksonomy” is bookmarked by 286 users, including me. If I click on this figure, I get a list on all those 286 people and might go further and see what other bookmarks they have, knowing that we have at least one in common.

On the right side you have the Tag Cloud. It is a visual representation of the occurrence of each tag. If I click on a tag, I get a list of all bookmarks tagged with this tag. The tags can also be visualized as an ordered list.

The inbox link in the head is like an RSS-reader. I can subscribe to another Delicious user’s bookmarks or I can subscribe to a certain tag. If I subscribe to another user’s bookmarks, I get every bookmark that user creates sent to my inbox, and if I subscribe to a certain tag, I get all bookmarks all users create that contain this certain tag. The inbox is effective if I want to keep track of a user with the same interests as I have, and the tag subscription is useful to get every bookmark the aggregated Delicious users create on my favorite subjects. There is also the possibility to subscribe to compositions of users and tags. Someone could for example subscribe to all bookmarks I create with the tag folksonomy, or bookmarks from me containing both folksonomy and cyborg (folksonomy+cyborg).

I can in addition subscribe to both user bookmarks and tags through an RSS reader with the following syntax:

• Main - del.icio.us/rss/
• User - del.icio.us/rss/joe
• Tag - del.icio.us/rss/tag/bananas
• User/Tag combo - del.icio.us/rss/julian/science
• User/Tag intersection - del.icio.us/rss/alan/music+dance
• Popular - del.icio.us/rss/popular
• URL - del.icio.us/rss/url?url=http://www.example.com

This means I can have a certain person’s bookmarks with tags of my interest in the same interface as my other subscriptions outside of Delicious. A special feature in Delicious RSS service is the possibility of subscribing to a certain URL. This can be used in several ways. I could for example subscribe to the URL of my own Web site, so that when someone on the Internet creates a Delicious bookmark of my site I get a message in my RSS reader. This URL can be external to Delicious or it can be internal. Thus I can get a message in my RSS reader when someone creates a bookmark for my Delicious site, i.e. http://del.icio.us/socialnavicreation.

The for link in the header is a recommendation system. All Delicious users can send recommendations of Web sites to other users. If someone sends me a recommendation of a certain Web site, I find the bookmark in my for-page. I click on the link, which takes me to that website where I can choose if I want to create a bookmark for myself or ignore it. To send a recommendation to another user is easily done by attaching the tag “for: username” when bookmarking a site. Then the site becomes both one of your own bookmarks and at the same time is sent to another user as a recommendation. This can also be done with bookmarks you already have by adding the for:username tag.

The post link in the header is used to post or create a bookmark. The link leads to a page where you can write a URL and other meta information. Meta information is information about information. In this context the most important meta information is a title and one or several tags. This function has some usefulness if you want to create a bookmark on a computer other than your own. The preferred way of creating a bookmark, however, is to use Delicious browser buttons. The browser buttons are a link to your Delicious user page and a special link with a javascript called a bookmarklet. The bookmarklet is a quick way of creating bookmarks; the javascript contains your username and password so you do not have to log in somewhere to create a bookmark. Just navigate your browser to the preferred page and click the bookmarklet link, type one or several tags and save the bookmark. I use these buttons in a Firefox plugin which puts two distinctive buttons at the left side of the address bar, see Figure 13. The white, blue and black square button links to my Delicious bookmarks and the Tag-button is the bookmarklet, which I press when I want to bookmark a page.

In the menu above the browser buttons there is an entry called del.icio.us, see the screenshots. Most entries in the menu I have dealt with above, but not the popular link. The popular link is both on the tool menu of the plugin and on the user page. The popular page is interesting but has a bad layout. It is difficult to understand the context of the popularity, for example: how long is the time span of the list. There are other sites which have the same information, but with a better interface. Since Delicious can deliver most of its information via RSS it is quite easy to build sites which use their information to display for a certain purpose. There is for example a Web site called populicio.us which has taken the information from del.icio.us and compiled a better popular page where it is possible to change the view of the page in order to have it displaying the most popular links of the last 24 hours, 48 hours, 1 week, 1 month, or the most popular of all time. Some day I will do a thorough analysis of these entries, but for now I am just pointing to some trends I see. The most bookmarked page is Slashdot with 13798 bookmarks (2006-01-20).

Slashdot’s title and subtitle say much of the content on the Web site: “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”. Slashes and dots are strongly identified with the URL, as URLs are structured through slashes and dots. I am curious about the word ‘nerd’ though. I have always looked upon it as a positive and cool word, as they must do at Slashdot. But indications I got from students in the Media Technology Programme at BTH strongly suggest that this is not the case. They do not see nerds as the heroes of the dot.com era, but as strange outsiders, bullied by the cool people. The students seem to have a more complex view of the word nerd than depicted in Hollywood movies. Stuff that matters is of course stuff that matters for nerds, which means computer freaks. The most popular bookmark is like an icon or logo of Delicious, because it is mostly people interested in computer related matters who use this site. The same kind of tendency can be noticed for Wikipedia, which includes more computer related words than a traditional Encyclopaedia.

Neither Delicious nor the person behind populicio.us give any information about how they create the popular lists. Thus you cannot be certain that the facts are accurate. Since this reluctance to reveal the “recipe” of their application is quite general on the Web, I cannot ignore every site that does not stand up to traditional standards for research sources. If one is to perform a detailed study of these applications and systems, one has to take this into account. In this study, I have decided to take the facts with a pinch of salt. They are just small pieces in a complex Web of knowledge, and every piece does not have to be entirely accurate for the knowledge Web to be useful in a research context.

The screenshot displays an excerpt from Most popular del.icio.us sites of all time. As you can see in the screenshot, the 20 most popular bookmarks in Delicious are all computer related. The places 2-4 are folksonomy related Web sites. The other big theme is Web development. As I mentioned above the Slashdot is like a symbol at the top of this nerd (as Slashdot say) mountain. I belong to this crowd, but in a mild sense, meaning that I am not as intuitive as many of my younger nerd companions.

Tags: delicious, services, web 2.0