Deliciously Decentralized
Just as bloggers like to blog about blogging, the del.icio.us crowd has an introspective bent. My latest Scrumptious version didn’t exactly shake the foundations of the blogosphere, but as part of the del.icio.us ecosystem it’s been a minor hit on del.icio.us itself. At present count the download page has been bookmarked by 57 folks (myself included), ensuring it a comfortable spot on the popular links page for the past couple of days. Above the fold, mind you.
This has driven traffic to my site like nobody’s business, doubling my daily visitor count, and provides a sneak preview of how (dare I say it) “long tail marketing” can be applied to web content. The equivalent of a superbowl ad in the blogging world is a shout out from an A-list blogger or aggregation site like Boing Boing or (famously) Slashdot. What all of these have in common is that they depend on the judgement of a small number of people (often just one) to decide which items are worthy of mention. Del.icio.us, on the other hand, is a wholly democratic medium. The result is a sort of Meta-Slashdot: the prominence of the actual articles (weblinks in this case) is the product of what is in essence a user-driven moderation system.
We’ve seen this before in guises such as Download.com’s Most Popular and Amazon’s Top Sellers. But this is the first time I’ve seen it applied to individual webpages (as opposed to whole websites). What del.icio.us has done is to provide a much-needed metric for measuring webpage popularity, where bookmarking a page is analogous to downloading a file or purchasing a book.
Interesting enough, there’s a heated debate taking place right now on the delicious-discuss mailing list that relates directly to the service’s role as a yardstick for webpage prominence. Joshua Schachter (who created the system) is proposing a switch from the current “…and N other people” label that graces popular bookmarks towards a more abstract representation like a bargraph. His argument is that the exact count is Too Much Information and clutters up the interface unnecessarily.
This has proven to be quite controversial, with many people arguing that the precise tallies aren’t superfluous at all. I agree. On the contrary, they represent much of the system’s value. Countless totals, from Amazon’s aforementioned sales rank to Technorati links to Bloglines subscribers, are presented to the user as raw numbers. We prefer to make our often subtle judgements about relative and absolute popularity ourselves, not have them distilled into little charts. After all, the fact that Scrumptious bookmarks jumped from 57 to 59 since I started writing this may seem unimportant to you, but it’s significant to me, by golly!
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There’s already an experimental version of that graphic bar. If you check for instance my del.icio.us page with a /new/ prefix you’ll se the bar. One important thing is that the bar has a title element with the exact number of bookmarks, so you see it on hover. This is a good compromise in my opinion, since it reduces clutter but makes it easy for more interested users like yourself (and me) to see more information.
Comment by Jacob Rask — 3/26/2005 @ 7:29 am
Jacob,
When you write software, you often find that the features that are hits among your users aren’t the ones you anticipated. In this case, I doubt that the “…and N other people” label was considered a core feature by Joshua when he first created the system, but it’s turned out to be one of the most valuable services that del.icio.us offers. I’m not sure that the “needless clutter” perception is that widespread, at least from the posts on the delicious-discuss list. There seems to be two sorts of people posting: a) people who have embraced the challenge of finding a cool graphical presentation (without any judgement about whether the current approach is really flawed) and b) those who would really prefer to keep the exact count.
I’m pretty sure this is why it’s proving so hard to find even a promising start for a new bargraph-based approach. The ability to scan down a page and see all the bookmarks counts, without having to mouse over each one, has become much more of a core feature than one might have expected at the outset.
Comment by Matt — 3/27/2005 @ 8:53 am
hi
Comment by hi — 2/4/2006 @ 4:50 pm