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138
Steve Weber
del.icio.us
http://del.icio.us was launched in 2004 and is a dominant social
bookmarking site. It’s a handy way for people to store their favorite Web
bookmarks online where they’re portable, instead of on the PC, confined
to one machine.
For example, a student writing a dissertation might use del.icio.us
to track all their source materials and commentary. Instead of having a
hard-to-read list of bookmarks in a drop-down menu on their Web
browser, users just consult their del.icio.us page to view their favorite
Web resources, along with their own annotations.
To organize their bookmarks, del.icio.us users tag them with
personalized keywords, like a folksonomy, instead of using a hierarchical
taxonomy or set categories. This makes it easier for del.icio.us users to
find relevant resources intuitively.
But here’s the ultimate value of social bookmarking: the ability to
share bookmarks with others, instantly tapping into collective wisdom.
For example, let’s imagine you want to learn about tropical fish. From
the del.icio.us home page, you search for “tropical fish.” Instead of
finding only the most universally popular sites Google shows you, on
del.icio.us you find the favorite resources of tropical-fish fanatics. These
are the resources valued by the people with experience, the people who
eat, breathe and sleep tropical fish.
Shared resources are the ones with real word of mouth, not just a
certain number of links or brute-force advertising. The results are the
best in the judgment of those who know the most. There’s no substitute
for recommendations by people who’ve consumed the content and found
it important, useful or entertaining.
Search is what you do when you know what you’re looking for.
Discovery is how you find what you didn’t know existed.
Smart crowds
When del.icio.us users save a Web page as a bookmark, they’re
“voting” for the page, much as Google’s PageRank measures how popular
a page is by counting incoming links. But with social bookmarks,
individuals vote. With social sites, everyone votes, not just Webmasters
and bloggers. Since individual Internet users vastly outnumber
Webmasters or bloggers, the collective wisdom is much richer.
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