Trends in Bookmarking
It has been observed elsewhere (Biddulph 2004) that URLs often
receive most of their bookmarks very quickly, the rate of new
bookmarks decreasing over time. While true, this tells only part
of the story. While many URLs (e.g. Figure 6a) do indeed reach
their peak of popularity as soon as they reach Delicious, many
other URLs (e.g. Figure 6b) have relatively few bookmarks for a
long time until they are “rediscovered” and then experience a
rapid jump in popularity. Of the 212 popular URLs in our
dataset, 142 (67%) reached their peak popularity in their first 10
days in Delicious, 37 of which (17%) on their first day. However,
at the other end of the spectrum, another 37 (17%) were in the
Delicious system for at least six months before reaching their peak
of popularity. The URL in our sample that took the longest
amount of time to peak in popularity did not do so until it had
been in the system for over 33 months.
A burst in popularity may be self-sustaining, as popular URLs are
displayed on the “popular” page, which users can visit to learn
what others are currently talking about. However, the initial cause
of a popularity burst is likely exogenous to Delicious; given that
Delicious is a bookmarking service, a mention on a widely read
weblog or website is a plausible primary cause. Kumar et al.
(2003) demonstrate “burstiness” among links in weblogs, and
literature on opinion and fad formation demonstrate how “wellconnected”
individuals and “fashion leaders” can spread
information and influence others (Wu & Huberman 2005;
Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer & Welch 1998).
the combined tags of many users’ bookmarks give rise to
a stable pattern in which the proportions of each tag are nearly
fixed. Empirically, we found that, usually after the first 100 or so
bookmarks, each tag’s frequency is a nearly fixed proportion of
the total frequency of all tags used. A web tool that visualizes Delicious
data, called Cloudalicious also shows this pattern.
This stability has important implications for the collective
usefulness of individual tagging behavior. After a relatively small
number of bookmarks, a nascent consensus seems to form, one
that is not affected by the addition of further tags. Users may
continually add bookmarks, but the stability of the overall system
is not significantly changed. The commonly used tags, which are
more general, have higher proportions, and the varied, personallyoriented
tags that users may use can coexist with them.
Moreover, because this stability emerges after fewer than 100
bookmarks, URLs need not become very popular for the tag data
to be useful.
The stable, consensus choices that emerge may be used on a large
scale to describe and organize how web documents interact with
one another. Given the current proliferation of sites that support collaborative
tagging, we expect that these sites will continue to provide a
fertile ground for studying computer mediated collaborative
systems in addition to providing users with new ways to share and
organize content.
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