Tag Archives: social-bookmarking

Scientific proof that Reddit should add a tagging system

June 3, 2008Blog, Uncategorizeddelicio.us, folksonomies, information-architecture, information-retrieval, Reddit, search-engines, social-bookmarking, Taxonomies, Web2.0Jason Morrison

First, a disclaimer: the title of this post is obviously exaggerated. Proof is an awfully big word to throw around, and although I employed pretty good experiment design practices and statistical checks, I can’t really prove that Reddit should do this or that. But I can show that what they are doing now is not working, at least when it comes to search.

So, I got an email the other day letting me know that my article, Tagging and Searching: Search Retrieval Effectiveness of Folkonsomies on the World Wide Web, is being published in the July 2008 issue of Information Processing and Management (here’s the official DOI link to the article). In the study I compared search performance between traditional search engines (like Google), subject directories (like Open Directory), and social bookmarking systems (like Reddit) and their folksonomies.

What’s a folksonomy? The word is a play on the term taxonomy – a taxonomy is a system of organizing and categorizing things, like the Dewey Decimal System. Taxonomies usually follow very strict rules and are controlled by experts. A folksonomy is a system of organization built by large numbers of regular users, who add things to the collection, evaluate them, and usually tag them with keywords.

In my study, the social bookmarking systems with tagging systems did surprisingly well – Del.icio.us was more precise than Open Directory, and at a cut off of 20 results it’s precision was fairly close to that of the search engines.

Reddit, however, did not fare so well. It consistently had the lowest precision, meaning that searches returned very few relevant results. There could be many reasons for this, but the biggest difference between Reddit and the others is the lack of tags.

Now, it’s possible that the folks at Reddit have no interest in search, or information retrieval in general. I think Reddit is very effective at bringing out new and interesting links on a daily basis and encouraging commentary (just my opinion, no stats to back that up). But I think it’s a big missed opportunity not to add tagging and see where it leads.

(One last disclaimer: this post is my personal opinion as someone who enjoys using Reddit and does not reflect on my employer. This post refers to research done independently as a grad student.)

A Scary, but Fascinating Idea – Javascript and CSS hack to see where your users have been

May 30, 2008BlogAjax, CSS, delicio.us, digg, Javascript, privacy, ShareThis, social-bookmarking, spyware, Web Design, web-developmentJason Morrison

I just ran across this post on Aza Raskin’s blog about a technique used to cut down the number of social bookmarking links displayed to users. I’m sure you’ve seen them–the 20 or so colorful buttons that have popped up at the bottom of every blog post on the web, for Digg, Del.icio.us and similar sites. On my blog they are hidden behind the ShareThis Widget but Raskin had a better idea – why not just display the ones each user actually uses?

Impossible? Not so fast – think about what happens when you visit a site. After your visit any links to the site will change, usually from blue to purple. We can put up links to each social bookmarking site and then use Javascript and CSS to check to see if each link has been visited. If so, display the button, and if not, hide it.

This is a very cool way to manage buttons but the technique has wider privacy implications. I could, for example, put links to… questionable sites, and then use some Ajax to collect that information about users. If I had other information about you (say you logged into my site or otherwise gave me an email address) I could link it together and build a database.

On the other hand, it’s not like I can grab your entire browsing history or follow you around after you leave my site – I have to specifically create a link and check it for every site I want to know about. And unlike your browser history this info is cleared every time you close your browser. So it’s not spyware or anything as intrusive as, say, the Alexa toolbar.

I can think of a bunch of cool ways to apply this technique, but I’m not sharing until I implement one. Feel free to post any ideas (or misgivings) in the comments below.