Recently in Internet as Identity Category

"In the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and 'friending,'" writes the New York Times today, "academic researchers see the resurgence of older patterns of oral communication."  Full article here.

Okay, so how about talking about something besides my own bookmarks?  Today I'd like to start looking at the most popular tags on del.icio.us, starting with the most popular: "design."

Let's look at the most popular bookmarks tagged with design.  There are basically three types of bookmarks: tools, concepts, and inspiration.

Tools are perhaps the most obvious bookmarks, I think.  Basically these are sites that help people design: 60 Advanced Photoshop Tutorials, Vector Logo Database, more Photoshop Tutorials, 100 (Legal) Free Sources for Stock Images.

Concepts are all those things about design.  For example, Elements of Great Web Design: The Polish, My Top 5 Biggest Freelancing Mistakes, The Best Designs, Architecture from Another Planet.  There are far fewer of these on the top bookmarks list, perhaps reflecting that people prioritize things that helps them get things done.  Not surprising.

The last category, inspiration, took me a while to figure out.  I would often tag things such as shopping sites, blogs, web tools, whatever, and find design listed as a popular tag.  What does this have to do with design, I thought?  Finally I figured it out: people were tagging these sites as examples of good design, or inspiration for their own designs.  The only unmistakable example of this on the top bookmarks list is the Dynamic Periodic Table, which is admittedly pretty nifty. 

But as I said, at least anecdotally I find that this way of tagging is used pretty often.  So what does that say?  First, it says that there is little general consensus on what is inspiring.  Second, it says that people find so many different things inspiring that it is difficult to generate a critical mass of popularity.  These two items are similar, but the flavor is slightly different I think.  Do you see what I mean?

A fun survey on motivation and the Web: "What Motivates Wikipedians?"

A post on VentureBeat (via Techmeme) looks at email startups, and buried within is an interesting insight on email as a source of identity analysis.

Rad says that Orgoo's goal is to make a user's past communications reveal deeper patterns about them. If all your messages are aggregated in one place, the inbox can be the target of an automatic analysis to "allow people to expose the hidden social networks and the hidden information," Rad says. "We want to create new ways for you to visualize email, easier ways to navigate through and see things in messages and relationships in a larger context. For example, if you look at Gmail, it groups your emails by subject line. That's good, but there are a lot of other ways to group, whether by sender, topic or something else. You want to create a user interface that allows you to re-thread conversations and put them in context."

I never thought of email in this way before.  I look forward to trying out these tools and seeing what I can dig up!

Okay, so today I'm going to do a quick analysis of just one tag, titled "useful."  I've included some of the bookmarks instead of just the tags here because you'll notice something quickly that's different from my last analysis: there is little cross-tagging for items with this tag.  Most things that are "useful" are only "useful," with a few exceptions.  So you need the bookmarks to see really what's going on here.

I'm working on a few more analysis posts at the moment, but I'm also writing an essay for an English class so I'm a little analyzed out!  So just a quick note for today about why I'm analyzing my own bookmarks.

It may seem a little curious to be analyzing my own bookmarks as a way of explicating my "del.icio.us as unconscious identity" thesis.  After all, I should already know my own identity, right?

First, I would feel weird choosing some random person and analyzing the crap out of their bookmarks.  Granted, I will have to do something like that (though probably not with del.icio.us) when writing my thesis/dissertation/whatever, but then it will at least be in a boring dissertation that no one besides my committee will read anyway.  (Well, I've read other peoples' non-boring dissertations and used them in research, but I dare not assign such qualities to my own work.)  Even though nobody read this blog either, at least some poor person won't be Googling their username and come across a whole research project devoted to them.  That would be weird.  Now, if someone volunteered, that would be different... *hint hint to non-existent readership*

Second, I can't say I really know my identity through del.icio.us that well.  This identity was developed unconsciously over the nearly three years I've been using it, and like most college students my identity has developed and changed quite a bit over those three years.  So I'm not looking to support an already-concluded hypothesis when it comes to my identity.  Rather, I'm interested to see what can be objectively revealed through a unique form of analysis.  It's pretty fun, actually.

I'm a big fan of O'Reilly Radar*, always a source for interesting thinking about the Internet.  I found Tim O'Reilly's post today about the semantic web touched a bit close to home.  I am generally a bit reticent to use the term Web 2.0 myself, but Tim's characterization is always unimpeachable!  Here he compares the semantic web and Web 2.0:

But for me, the paradigmatic example of Web 2.0 is Google's Pagerank. Not only did it lead to the biggest financial success story to date, it is the example that makes us think hardest about the true meaning of "collective intelligence." What Larry Page realized was that meaning was already being encoded unconsciously

by web page creators when they linked one page to another. And that understanding that a link was a vote allowed Google to give better search results than people who, up to that time, were just searching the contents of the various documents on the web.

And so, it seems to me that Pagerank illustrates the fundamental difference between the approaches of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. The Semantic Web sees meaning as something that needs to be added to documents so that computers can act intelligently about them. Web 2.0 seeks to discover the ways that meaning has already been implicitly encoded by the way people use documents and digital objects, and then to extract that meaning, often by statistical means by studying large aggregates of related documents.

My basic research methodology uses literary analysis to extract the implicit meaning "encoded by the way people use documents and digital object," as Tim puts it.  By this measure I am terribly Web 2.0 aren't I?  Ha, just kidding.  But really if it weren't for Web 2.0 I wouldn't be writing what I am today, and this article speaks quite clearly to the reason for that.  Give it a read!

* Admittedly I am biased because I play copyeditor and partner-in-crime for Artur!

There is a super neat tool called del.icio.us direc.tor, which provides an AJAX interface for browsing your del.icio.us tags.  (I guess I will switch over to delicious when the new version is released, but I am kind of attached to the dots!)  One interesting thing is that when you browse a tag, it shows related tags and then allows you to browse bookmarks with both tags.  These combinations of tags can be sort of interesting, so I thought I'd show a few examples from my own bookmarks.  Here's the first one.

Let's look at a tag I use pretty frequently, "jewish."  Now, you can glean a few things about me from this view.  First, compare this tag to other tags around it.  With 67 bookmarks, it's pretty clear that I find a lot of sites that fit the category of Jewish to be important enough to save them for future reference.  In other words, it's probably safe to say that Judaism is important to me, or even that Jewishness is an important part of my identity.  And that is pretty accurate!

But perhaps a more interesting point of analysis is how this tag overlaps with others.  The list of sub-tags is pretty diverse.  First, there are a number of travel destinations (poland, stockholm, travel) and my two home cities (seattle and sf).  You could say that being involved in Jewish life is something I'm involved with both home and away, a fact supported if you look at the bookmarks and see synagogues to attend while traveling.   Second, there are some seemingly tangential and secular topics, such as comics, laugh (i.e., things that makes me laugh), law, and news.  So you could guess that Judaism is something that pervades all spheres of my daily life.  Third, it's interesting to note how little overlap there is between "jewish" and "israel," only one tag out of israel's 20 (seen on the left).  Perhaps a comment on how Israel has become a less important facet of modern Jewish life?  After all, one of the original motivations of the Reform movement was to deemphasize messianic Israel in the liturgy (Wikipedia has a bit on this).  Perhaps here you can judge how that has trickled down to a modern progressive Jew, which from my bookmarks you might term an interest in Israel that is largely separate from religious practice.

To support this last point, compare this tag to another one frequently used, "cute."  Yes, I am the kind of girl who tags cute pictures to look at when she has a bad day.  But  never mind that, comparing is our task here!  As you can see, this has been used almost as frequently as jewish, at 43 (vs. 69) uses.  But instead of the multiple overlaps like with "jewish," it has only one, with two bookmarks also tagged "blog."  (I bet you can guess one, if not the other!)  So while I am interested on keeping up on the latest in cuteness, you can't really say that cuteness pervades every sphere of my life like Judaism does.  I certainly wish it did though!

The neat part is although you can tease out parts of my identity from this, I didn't intend to present this in the first place!  All I did was bookmark sites I wanted to refer to later on, and over a few years this little picture of me emerged.  I'd love to find more tools to help create pictures of identity like this.

So there is my first bit of using del.icio.us direc.tor to do a little literary identity analysis.  I have a few more examples saved up, but I'll maybe do those another day.  All this analysis has made me hungry for dinner already!

One of my favorite web tools by far is del.icio.us.  I started using it back in 2004 so I could access my bookmarks from anywhere, but what held my interest is tagging.  Oh, how I love to tag.  Like any good comparativist the only thing I love more than categorization is redefining categorization.  Really, anything that plays with the boundaries of semantics?  It makes me all tingly.*

And so it's no surprise that lately I have been thinking about the identity performance of del.icio.us users.  Because with del.icio.us, particularly before the advent of private tagging, you can't just access your bookmarks from anywhere.  Anyone can access your bookmarks from anywhere.  Not only is it public, but it's also social: you can see every other user's bookmarks, and your semantic structure is integrated with others' through those bookmarks.  I find it fascinating to click through on a popular bookmark and see all the different tags used.

With public bookmarking, you are presenting an identity, whether you think about it or not.  And with social bookmarking, that identity is inextricably linked with the identities presented by other users.

I'll expand on those two points a bit later.  Now I am tired and off to bed!

* I should point out that I'm in the new delicious preview, and it really expands on this by making tagging and viewing (a la del.icio.us director) much more flexible.  I am in love.  I am sure I will have more to write about that before long.