The Wisdom of Crowds (with bookmarks)

You’ve probably seen these symbols at the bottom of a webpage and you’ve wondered what they were:

Well they are social bookmarks and reader feeds. It enables you to share the items with other people and to also subscribe to the website for updates. Lately, I’ve been really into bookmarks and I don’t mean the kind you put into books. I’ve previously written about social bookmarking, tagging, taxonomies and folksonomies.

But essentially, for the uninitiated, social bookmarking is a way to publicly share bookmarks (i.e. websites). So instead of just saving it to your internet brower in “book marks”, your letting the world know what your interested in.

Initially, I thought it was pretty cool because I get to access my bookmarks wherever I am. Whether I’m using firefox or IE, at home or a work, on my desktop or laptop, in Australia or overseas. I was saving all my websites onto a webpage for all to see and for me to refer back to. But that was just for my own benefit. However, social bookmarking was wider benefits:

1. Quickly see what websites / newstories / trends are popular

I’m starting to on a regular basis scan the top ranked stories on Digg and Delicious to see what’s happening. With Digg and other social bookmarking websites, the more people that “digg” the article (recommend it) or save the article, the higher it moves up the ranking. It’s very useful to seeing pop culture trends.

For example Digg was able to call the US election well before the opinion polls with credible evidence. It had an option where you could “digg” whether you voted for Obama or McCain. Of course, it was a little bit skewed since people like me voted in the Digg election, but it had a basis for calling the election in Obama’s favour given his popularity on being recommended on Digg. Another skewing factor is that a proportion of Obama voters tended to be younger and more technologically savvy than McCain voters.

2. Results in finding more interesting articles that are relevant to you

There’s a team of thousands if not millions of people on Digg, Delicious, Slashdot, Stumbleupon trawling the web, so more people are going to find more interesting content. The web is an enormous place, kinda like a massive goldfield. When someone finds something, by bookmarking, they are letting the world know that this is interesting to them and they want to share it with other people. By bringing attention to it, they are drawing other people to their discovery and if they find it interesting, they’ll share it with even more people creating a multipler effect. So more interesting discoveries are found.

It becomes more relevant because users can apply tags, categories, and comments to the things they save. Essentially, its like trawling the web with a team of people that are cataloging it into a library. The benefit of a social bookmark like Delicious is that users can write their own tags (similar to labels) for websites. For example, I might come across a website with a DVD review of the TV series Entourage. So I will label it as “Entourage”, “HBO”, “DVD review”, and other relevant labels. So when you browse categories for TV shows or Entourage or DVD reviews, that website would come up. You can funnel the search so your only looking at stuff in that category. If I am only interested in Entourage, then only search results labelled as “Entourage” by users would come up.

You can also follow the bookmarks of like minded people and also share them with groups. Say for example, you and your friend have similar interests such as hip hop, basketball, travel and instead of sending the websites back and forth, you can see the websites that he or she is saving. Or if you are working in a team on an academic project, everyone in the team can see the collective links that are being saved.

Which leads to……..

3. Better search results, creating a more perfect search engine

Some proponents like myself think that having more chefs in the kitchen, will over time generate better tagging (labelling), offerring a more refined search engine. This is because users can elect to search exclusively within Delicious, Digg or other social bookmarks, and find things that actual users have tagged as opposed to Google’s web crawl agent which uses mathematical algorithims. Actual users will decide what category a website belongs in and what keywords to associate with it.

The problem is that this system of taxonomy (the science of classification) relies on the individual user and there are often no rules around it. Going back to our previous example, I might label the above website as “tv series” or even mistakely as another tv show. Different people will apply different tags according to their views, perspectives, and tagging patterns. Some people are more comprehensive in their tagging while others might tag at a minimal level.

HOWEVER…………..

If there are enough users, over time and through the collective wisdom of a group of people, more popular tags will rise to the top. If 1,000 people tagged the website, then more likely than not, they will develop a set of tags which have consensus. For example, Delicious will recommend to users certain keywords to tag, assisting in developing group consensus. Again, a lot of this will depend on how many users they are in the social bookmarking network.

Catch me if you can

For me, the main thing now is sharing with other people the websites that I am interested in and having a reference to go back to websites that are interesting to me. You can find me on:

http://delicious.com/Inspiredworlds

I also have a Stumbleupon account but I don’t use it much. And I’m starting to get into the subculture of Digg. Check it out here. What I have also done is added Digg to my twitter account. So I get frequent updates on the top stories on Digg with over 2,000 Diggs – its basically my way to keep my pulse on what’s hot. I also subscribe to an RSS feed for the top results for “Social Media” for Digg.

I’m out like saving bookmarks,

Matthew Ho.

p.s. Check out the music on Delicious! You can listen to hip hop music feeds.

Folks its time to discover folksonomies

Folksonomy is a term I’ve come across recently in a couple of articles and on my company’s blog. To begin with, taxonomy is the science of classification – that’s my understanding. The way in which content creators/librarians/administrators, etc… create categories to classify information.

Folksonomy is play on the word taxonomy. Its how “folks”, normal people like you and me and the general web community can add our own labels known as “tags” to information. A good example is Youtube, Del.ico.us and Flickr and blogs. When you upload information or media, each of these allows the user to apply our own “tags” to create our own categories to search. For example when I finish writing this post on this blog, I have the option of creatiing new tags which allow others and myself to find it when the search function is used. It also will put it in a category allowing others to see it. So I’ll add tags like “taxonomy”, “folksonomy”, “metadata”, etc…

A classical example of a taxonomy is dewey decimal system used for books in libraries. It is a system to classify the hundreds of millions of books, so that users can find books. Folksonomies differ because the user can add their own labels, effectively creating our own kind of dewey decimal system.

The strength of folksnomies is that it allows more users to create labels (tags or if your really nerdy – “metadata”) and is more useful in a system where there are even more information to categorise. In the past, taxonomies were restricted to administrators like librarians or authors (content creators). But now, with the explosion of information, videos, pictures, websites being uploaded and shared on the internet – folksnomies has had its greatest use. It allows scalability – it can grow with the more users and more information that is shared.

I’ve actually being using tags for a while – for my own blogs. It is an easy to keep track of everything and to search for posts. Because I know in my mind what kind of tags I would use.

The second strength of tags is that users are better equipped to label their own information because they are more engaged with the content and have a deeper interaction with it. For example, if I read an article that I like and add it to the social bookmarking site “Del.ico.us” (now www.delicous.com), I will add in labels about what I feel the article is about. I would have read the article, thought about it, etc.. and put related tags opposed to a search engine that uses web crawlers that would scan for the keywords in the article.

However, this is also a weakness of folksonomy because the user is biased as to what that article is about – different users can potentially put vastly different labels. Further, users can use the same labels for different things. As this paper mentions, the tag ANT can refer to “Actor Network Theory” but also “Apache ANT” a programming language. So folksnomies is not without its problems.

One of the interesting things I found with Delicous is that when you are about to save a link and add in your tags, it will actually recommend tags that other people have put on there. I look at them and think “ok, that sounds alright” and you can click on those links – that is one way to help users add labels and create consistency across tagging. I can also add in my own tags as well and ignore the recommended ones.

Folksonomies allow users to create new terms and to start creating paths for finding things. It also can introduce you to new information or media, because you can click on a category or tag and discover what other people have posted up under the same tag.

And to clarify, metadata is the search terms or tags you put into a page, allowing web crawlers to find your information. It is important when putting in the terms for metadata to think of all the various terms a user might type in to find something – for example if you have a company webpage about soccer, you also want to use the term “football” which is what the rest of the world calls it. So the page wont get rejected if people dont type in soccer.

I’m out like folksonomies,

Matt.

Stuff I’m reading

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately reading about email marketing. It’s one of the main areas I work in, so I believe its beneficial for me to read up on it. From what I’ve read and just my own thoughts, email campaigns are pretty important since its the second highest expenditure of internet advertising after search engine marketing. However, the key is to not look at any of these things in isolation.

Email is one of the main forms of communication these days. I was talking to someone about it today, rarely do we send business documents or correspondence through physical mail – its all email these days. I talk to everyone in my office and my clients, my friends, via email because of the speed of communicating. the key with email marketing is to send relevant content to people at the right time.

You’v got to communicate with customers and potential customers with stuff they are interested in. You are only allowed to send email communcation to people that have opted in to recieve the content. Once someone has opted in (i.e. given you permission), they’ve explicity told you that they are happy to recieve things from you. They are more likely to open the email, engage with the content and transact, forward it on, etc…Providing relevant content is the key.

The best digital marketers will look at how all these things are fit together – how search engine, email, social networking, landing pages, portals, blogs, internet ads, etc… complement each other. I’m fortunate to be working at a place that has an integrated approach – we do end to end digital marketing i.e we look at everything. Having said that, you also need to understand how digital marketing fits within the overrall marketing plan and also with the business goals.

So far I’ve discovered a couple of email service providers – companies that provide bulk email service. They allow you to manage a list of people to send to, and the ability to send to large numbers of people, and provide reporting functions on the emails sent. The main competitors I’ve found overseas are Bronto, i-contact, Constant Contact. In Australia, its Campaign Master. I’ve been reading up on the white papers in Bronto (half the stuff is promoting itself) but its got some useful tips in there.

On another note, I’ve also signed up for del.ico.us. its a social bookmarking site. I had some idea what it was, and I always saw it at the bottom of a lot of articles i read online. So I decided to join! Social bookmarking sites allow you to bookmark webpages and store the links online. its quite handy, because you can access the links whereever you are online – i.e. its not stored on your computer but rather in cyberspace. Plus you can also give websites a tag (a keyword description) and longer descriptions, group links together, and share them with your friends.

You can also search for stuff within social bookmarking webpages and some argue it leads to better search results as well. the user is more engaged with the content and will read the article/webpage. however, peopel use different types of descriptors as tags. I might read a article about michael jordan playing basketball. I might tag it as “basketball”, “jordan”, “Air” and “Bulls”. Someone else might use “23”, “chicago”, “MJ”, etc…. This is because there are no rules in tagging – you can put whatever you want and the user is more subjective with the content, as opposed to a cold heartless, objective search engine.

Lastly, I’ve also been reading up about the semantic web, Web 3.0, content publishing, and checking out some search engine data (see below).

Looks like taking quite the digital slant aren’t I? I read somewhere that you can be an expert in this area in a couple of years. I’ve only spent about 3 months in this area, but if i stay interested in keep progressing and learning more, I could be well on my way! In other good news, I got a distinction in my advertising subject “media planning and buying”….78% baby! I scored 91% in the actual exam!!!! And to think that I knew nothing about advertising or media buying/planning before I even took the course, nor did I even work in the area.

I’m out like bookmarks,

Matt Ho.

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: