Sharing of research links on mailing lists versus social bookmarking in Del.icio.us
Today avid Del.icio.us participants create small, mostly anonymous interest alliances that are similar to their push media equivalents. The Spectre mailing list, for example, offers announcements but also recommendations of active contributors like Geert Lovink who frequently posts URLs followed by a short excerpt from that site and sometimes a note about the motivation for posting it. The attention of Spectre subscribers is drawn to these sites and the posts become smoke signals from the forwarding person. This can be useful if somebody writes a book and perhaps does not feel comfortable to widely share their original writing for long stretches of time before the book gets published.Compared to this link sharing practice on mailing lists, Del.icio.us' attention economics is of smaller scale with researchers in one so called network following what others bookmarked, also reading their bookmark descriptions. Del.icio.us, in an ego-friendly way, calls people in one's network "fans." Your "network" consists of people who look through your bookmarks and also the people to whose bookmarks you pay attention. Mutuality, people whom you who also read you are acknowledged with a small icon. The largest "fan" number that I saw was around 450. The number of people whom you follow depends on your attention willingness and of course their relevance to your pursuits. Sometimes the visibility/"publicness" of a scholar or critic motivates people to become their "fan," or shall we say groupie, even if the actual bookmarks are not all that thought-provoking.
Howard Rheingold, in a very helpful manner, writes fairly in-depth descriptions of the sites that he bookmarks thus coming very close to the format of Geert Lovink's reference-type posts on Spectre. Descriptions of bookmarks in Del.icio.us become for some practitioners outlets to address the readers in a network-- they are clearly written with the reader in mind. Unlike on a mailing list, on Del.icio.us networks one can see who 'feeds' one's bookmarks. But many people don't use their real name and not all Del.icio.us contributors chose to link to their websites. So, while I know that 'alex34' is in my network- I have no idea who is behind that identity. But I can see his bookmarks. The same is true for Spectre where some people don't use their real name either. However, my preliminary impression is that on Spectre more people identify themselves than on Del.icio.us. One reason may be privacy concerns as a large number of tagged bookmarks together with descriptions creates a rather informative portrait of a person.
On Del.icio.us bookmarking is less about "ego casting" than about "memos to self" that also benefit a group. I save my bookmarks predominantly for selfish reasons (research reference and teaching) but also for the benefit of the small group that feeds my bookmarks as well as the much larger community that may come across my bookmarks through tag searches. My motivation, therefore, is a mix of self-interest and investment in the creation of communal value. This searchability of bookmarks is a huge advantage of Del.icio.us over the posting research links to lists. A mailing list archive will only be used by fervent researchers while Del.icio.us searches are a common plug-in in browsers like Firefox. In addition, Del.icio.us tags can be easily added to the sidebar in weblogs thus interfacing your sharing practice with an even larger group. An increasing number of bloggers also adds daily Del.icio.us link updates directly as posts to their blog. The folksonomy of tags- this folksy naming/taxonomy practice, allows for a more narrow focus. I can find bookmarks most closely associated with my interests (interest archipelagos appear).Another important factor is that people are more hesitant to post to lists. Saving a link on Del.icio.us is far less "pushy." Del.icio.us bookmarking allows for a more in-depth sharing practice of a group of very weak ties. The networks on Del.icio.us are communities of research practice, not unlike what Etienne Wenger described as communities of practice.
On Spectre, however, I can easily get in touch with contributors, while that is not at all the case on Del.icio.us where it is very rare that people provide their email address (Clay Shirky is one of those exceptions who used to have his email address added to his Del.icio.us account name but recently he has removed it).
While my immediate network on Del.icio.us is far smaller than the about 1000 subscribers to Spectre, the 1 million people with a Delicious account make up a far larger potential group of people who benefit from my social bookmark sharing practice.
In the end, I prefer Del.icio.us (and other web-based social bookmarking sites like it!!) to push media like mailing lists in terms of sharing resources. It reaches a greater depth as a larger number of bookmarks renders a research area of the poster but it is also much less about ego casting. However, announcements and urgent calls for boycotts, for example, are much more appropriate for mailing lists.
As the end of the year approaches, and it's that of time of the year when silly predictions circulate, I anticipate that the sharing of research links on mailing lists will become less appreciated, perhaps a dinosaur practice of the past.
[Trebor]
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