Three Ways to View Social Bookmarking Systems

I was reading online the other day and someone said they were looking for a visualization of social bookmarking systems to show people who were totally unfamiliar with them. (I can’t find the post right now, but I’ll update this when I find the link.) I took a shot at this because it might be useful for my thesis. It’s just not simple to illustrate, so I’m not sure how effective this will be. I did this in Illustrator, so if you want to modify it here’s the .ai file.

When you view a social bookmarking system by web page you’re seeing all of the users that have saved the page to the system, as well as the tags they assigned to it. When you view a system by tag you’re seeing all of the web pages assigned by particular users to a particular tag. Tags can’t exist without web pages assigned to them. When you view a system by user you’re seeing all of web pages and tags a person has saved to the system. It’s easy to pivot between these three views, usually with one click.

What’s not shown here is that the default method of organization of items under each view is time. A secondary method is “popularity,” which differs based on which of the three views you’re in. In web page view you could see what the popular tags are for that page, you could also see how many users saved it. In tag view you could see the most popular web pages in that tag – which is calculated based on a mix of recency and overall number of users who have that page in their collection. In user view you could see which tags that person has applied the most frequently – although I wouldn’t call that popularity exactly.

The best way to explain social bookmarking is probably just to do a tour through the system, although even with that I’ve had mixed success in a presentation type of setting.