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Del.icio.us: A Tool for the Many |
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 Del.icio.us is a "social bookmarks manager" 30 designed
for people to add, tag, and share websites they have bookmarked.
Although most people begin by posting and tagging their own bookmarks, Del.icio.us allows people to browse everyone else's bookmarks and tags as well, and this is a part of what makes Del.icio.us so popular. Browsing can be done through a list of current "popular" sites, "popular" and "recent" pages for each tag, or personal user pages.31 The issue of disambiguated language is addressed by a list of "related tags" at the side of the screen, as you can see in the screenshot above.  Del.icio.us
is an example of a broad folksonomy. In this case, the
content
creator is not likely to be the person tagging the website, and there
may be many people tagging the same site with either the same or
different tags.32
Because many people are tagging the same sites,
users see
the different terms and styles of other users tags, and may be
influenced to use new terms in their own tagging.33
This interaction does not happen as readily within Flickr's narrow folksonomy, and as Thomas Vander Wal notes, it makes Del.icio.us a much more fruitful place to begin discussing statistics of tag use, and to study the development of accepted terms for particular topics.34 As on Flickr, personally-oriented tags do appear, an example being the tag " toread."35 It is worth noting, however, that if the URL being tagged is not personal, even this list may be useful to other users who share common interests. *Click Image to Magnify
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