Week 8-Response to readings: The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems

I have made several entries on the topic of the social bookmarking system, Delicious, from the point of view of its usefulness as an organizational tool. As previously stated, I have found it to be immensely helpful in facilitating my "sensemaking” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 3) of the plethora of information to be dealt with in the context of our coursework. For this reason it was interesting to explore a bit of the theory behind this very practical collaborative tagging system. It was particularly fascinating to compare how the evolution of my own tagging behaviours meshed with many of the issues addressed in the Golder and Huberman article.
Once I learned what Delicious was, my rationale for using it was very simple. It allowed me quick access to articles, research papers, videos and many other resources from any computer anywhere. It wasn’t until I began amassing a rather large inventory of resources that I started to appreciate the use of tagging as a means of filtering through my own “library”. For this reason I began to develop and fine tune a system of tagging that would best serve my needs. For these reasons, I fall very solidly into the broadest category of Delicious users described my Golder and Huberman: those who use Delicious for their own interest. Here is where the theory, as explained by Golder and Huberman, adds another layer to my understanding of Delicious and other social bookmarking tools. The authors explain that most users of Delicious bookmark for their own interest and not expressly for the “collective good”. Despite this fact, because of the public nature of Delicious, “useful public good” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 3) may result anyway. It is the public aspect of Delicious that I had not fully explored before reading the Golder and Huberman article, so I will focus somewhat on this element now.
What makes Delicious “public” is the fact that, not only can you see your own bookmarks, you can access all bookmarks created by others. Delicious also allows access to other users’ personal pages and allows a filtering of these pages by tag. These features can provide an additional way of researching. If, for example, I was interested in articles on gaming addiction, I could browse others’ Delicious pages using the tags “gaming” and “addiction”, or maybe “gaming_addiction”, in order to find out what likeminded people were reading about these topics.
Golder and Huberman put some emphasis on the potential pitfalls of collaborative tagging in their article. Because there is no set taxonomy and everyone can tag as they see fit, certain challenges present themselves. This being the case, it is somewhat surprising that the tagging system is actually quite “stable” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 7). This stability is apparently due to the fact that, “after a relatively small number of bookmarks, a nascent consensus seems to form, one that is not affected by the addition of further tags” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 7). They believe that this stability has “important implications for the collective usefulness of individual tagging behaviour” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 7). The authors attribute tagging stability to two factors, “imitation and “shared knowledge” (Golder and Huberman, 2008, p. 7). This makes sense to me in the context of my own behaviour on Delicious. When I first started tagging, I created my own tags without paying much attention to the interface showing “public tags”. As my library grew, the tags I began with were no longer useful because they were too general. I realized that my tags needed to be more specific and it became helpful to look to the public tags for “advice”. The idea of “shared knowledge” makes sense as well. It would be interesting to take a peek at some of the tags my colleagues are using to filter their course resources, but my guess is that they would be fairly similar to my own.
I will definitely continue to use Delicious and, thanks to Golder and Huberman, I can now more fully appreciate the ways in which social bookmarking benefits the greater collaborative community.