Social bookmarking and tagging behavior: an empirical analysis on delicious and connotea

Abstract

Social bookmarking services have shown themselves as common and popular Internet tools by successfully acquiring millions of users, with Delicious being one of the most popular social bookmarking services to the public. While Delicious is used mainly for general purposes, Connotea, another social bookmarking site that primarily serves academic and scientific interests, has become equally popular among researcher groups. This paper attempts to analyze and compare users’ bookmarking and tagging behavior in Connotea and Delicious. The results show that there is a distinctive difference in usage behavior among these two groups of users. Delicious users create bookmarks more frequently than Connotea users, but Connotea users tend to use more distinctive tags for their bookmarks than Delicious users. Moreover, our result from the analysis indicates that the number of bookmarks created is a significant predictor of the quantity of tags used. This study is a starting point from which to explore the reasons behind the difference in social bookmarking and tagging behavior among different usage orientation groups.