Baseball: America's National Pastime

This time around, I will give an overview of “del.icio.us”, a social bookmarking website that I began to use while posting on this blog. Del.icio.us is a place to store, share, and find bookmarks to various websites across the internet. Users can tag a website with any number of self-generated keywords, and can consequently search for websites within del.icio.us’s large tag-based database of websites.

Upon initial usage of del.icio.us, I was impressed by its simple HTML interface, easy-to-remember URL, and the site’s ease of navigability. Within minutes, a user is able to sign up and begin tagging. Another useful aspect of del.icio.us is the “hotlist,” “recently added,” and “popular” pages, which allow users to access new and relevant websites without extensive searching.

Social bookmarking intends to be a step up from traditional means of searching the web, like using a search engine such as Google. Whereas Google’s classification of web pages is computed algorithmically based upon words which seem to be important, del.icio.us’s websites are tagged by users who actually read and understand the content and can determine which keywords are most appropriate.

In theory, del.icio.us seems to be an improvement in modern web searching techniques. However, I feel that the site has many drawbacks which must be improved. The first problem is that there is no standardized structure of the tags. Some tags are capitalized, some are in caps, some are plural, and some are singular. It seems as if there is a need for some sort of expandable, standardized list of tags that users can choose from when tagging. Also, the del.icio.us tagging system doesn’t account for homographs or synonyms. For example, when searching for an article about “permits,” (as in a driver’s permit) one of my results was a new article where the president “permits immigration”. The system should also allow for a search to result in common synonyms. For example, if I search for “extra”, sites tagged with “additional” should show up. A final suggestion for del.icio.us would be to include a hierarchy of tags within a webpage. When a user tags a site, they might enter 8 words. These 8 words all seem to have the same level of importance, when in reality one of the tags may be more important than the others.

As for a few searching tips, I’ve discovered a few through my del.icio.us use. The del.icio.us toolbar allows for fast and easy tagging while surfing the web. Also, del.icio.us search includes both tags and descriptions. If the user wants to search ONLY tags, he or she can search “tag: keyword,” and the search engine will search only the tags.

Will I continue to use del.icio.us? Probably not. The advantages of having “user-created” tags doesn’t outweigh the pain of having to tag websites every day. Google works for me!