Analyzing Social Bookmarking Systems: A del.icio.us Cookbook
July 10th, 2008 . by rw
We recently analized the structure and dynamics of social bookmarking systems. For this purpose, we spent six months on crawling about 142 million del.icio.us bookmarks coming from around 1 million users. I will give an overview of our findings here. Details can be found in this paper which I am going to present at the ECAI 2008.
The growth of del.icio.us
According to this blog, the del.icio.us bookmarking site went online in Sep. 2003 and, as our data indicates, has seen an exponential growth since then. According to our dataset, there where over 7,305,559 newly added bookmarks and 47,429 newly appearing del.icio.us users in December 2007.
There is an interesting period in the first half of 2006 where del.icio.us didn’t encounter much growth at all, but plateaud at around 3.5 million new bookmarks a month. This pattern was also reported by other authors, but the reason remains unclear.
The monthly growth of del.icio.us between 2004 and 2008 by posted bookmarks, new users, new URLs and new tags.
