Sebastian Kirsch: Blog

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I have not written about it in this blog yet, but my diploma thesis is going to be about community structures in knowledge networks, with applications in knowledge management and collaborative web search.

One tool for collaborative management of bookmarks is del.icio.us. Its greatest virtue is its simplicity: Every user can upload URLs and attach tags and a description to them. The URLs can later be queried by username or a combination of tags. For every URL, information about who else bookmarked this item is available, plus the tags used to bookmark the item. You can also subscribe to the bookmark list of other users and be notified when they bookmark new sites. (But you cannot find out who subscribes to your bookmarks.)

The system is completely centralized. There is no real community support for knowledge sharing. It also relies on manual tagging (though this could probably be hacked to include referrer information from web search engines.)

As with similar systems (AudioScrobbler comes to mind), it’s appealing at first because it is very simple, but the collaborative nature is limited because of the lack of communication facilities between users and the lack of community support. I suppose these features could be added eventually.