Thesis - Social Bookmarks: Personal Organization and Collective Discovery on the Web

I’m finally officially done with my M.A. thesis

Here’s a link to the full PDF Social Bookmarks: Personal Organization and Collective Discovery on the Web

Summary:

Social bookmarking sites, where internet users collect and share their web references, provide a new way to organize and explore the web. Tags are freely chosen keywords applied to web references, then publicly aggregated with all other users. This is the defining feature of social bookmarking. Reactions to these sites and others deemed “web 2.0,” have tended to over es- timate their potential, or completely dismiss it, similar to the early history of web 1.0. In this the- sis I have investigated social bookmarking in detail by focusing on the users of the first social bookmarking site, del.icio.us. I used in-depth interviews as well as content analysis to discover more about how people understand the information on del.icio.us, and the implications of the site’s structure.

My findings suggest that people understand their own posts to del.icio.us as a memory aid as well as a sign of what they value. The posts of others, when aggregated, signified the interests of del.icio.us users as a group, and social trends on the web. It is possible to analyze this content much further, and while only a few do this infrequently, it is still an important development. The posts of other users often derived significance from prior knowledge of the individual. In the less common case of a browsing an individual account without any outside-del.icio.us information about that person, the posts were taken at face value, which depends on the browser’s prior expe- riences and purpose.

The design of the site balances the tensions between personal information archive pur- poses and public discovery. Tags are chosen for reasons of personal organization but repurposed for discovery. They are, at once, for private and public purposes. There is tension also between personal privacy and the social norm of openness among users. The balance between these ten- sions has allowed personal archiving and public discovery to come together in one system.