delicious blog

The state of the Delicious hive mind in 2008

I talk to a lot of people who use Delicious — on the forum, by email, on Twitter, and more — so I have a sense of what individuals think about the service, but I thought it’d be fun to check out what large numbers of people do on Delicious when they’re not asking for new features, reporting bugs, or praising the arrival of bulk edit. Let’s see!

Here are people’s top ten searches on Delicious for 2008, with some commentary:

1. news — Along with the usual faces such as BBC News and CNN, Delicious likes Slashdot, Digg, and a visualization called Newsmap.
2. blogs — These results contain a variety of lists and tools for people who want to find more to read or want to write their own blogs, including The Hype Machine and Edublogs.
3. reference — People find Delicious useful as a practical source of knowledge, hooray. Delicious users betray their nerdiness by providing specialized resources for programming and web design for many of these results.
4. wiki — Several of these results are for wiki software (which makes sense, since deciding on a software package might be the hardest thing about starting a wiki), but one of them is Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki, which looks like a handy reference.
5. restaurants — Guides for New York, London, and everywhere. Sounds good to me.
6. hotels — Most of these results are useful for cost-effective comparison, but a lot of Delicious people have also bookmarked Unusual Hotels of the World, Design Hotels, and Unique Hotels for Global Nomads.
7. css — Delicious’ slight geeky bias means that searching for a technical topic gets you the best tutorials, documentation, and tips. And luckily, people searching for CSS probably aren’t looking for anything else.
8. web 2.0 — What do people want when they search for this? I’m not sure, but they can find all kinds of things, from a how-to design style guide to The Machine is Us/ing Us. See also our 2005 blog post that attempts to answer what is web 2.0?
9. artists — Delicious’ taste ranges across places to find out about artists (the-artists.org), places to buy and sell work (Etsy), and places where you can find drawings by my friends (deviantART), along with blogs and artists’ organizations.
10. music — I figure people are looking for new music here, and they can find a lot of it, from Pandora to Last.fm and Musicovery, and if their searches lead to bookmarked mp3s, they can use the built-in Delicious media player to listen right away.

These may seem like normal informational searches, but the results are useful because those sites have all been judged good by many thousands of people like you and me (out of the millions who use Delicious). A little more character comes out in the list of the next ten top searches: facebook, games, photoshop, iphone, photography, nightlife, diy, apple, science, and firefox.

If you use the Delicious Firefox addon, you can switch your top-right search box to Delicious and search like this all the time:

35 comments December 18th, 2008

limited time offer

Do you want some del.icio.us stickers? Or a few del.icio.us bookmarks - the kind you put inside books? We have a surplus of dots here at the tag mines, and we’d like to distribute them more evenly around the world. To get some schwag, mail a self-addressed stamped envelope to the following address:

Yahoo! Inc.
c/o del.icio.us
2821 Mission College Blvd.
Santa Clara, CA 95054-1838

We’ll fill it with goodies and send it back to you. If you want to, include a note with your username, email address, and a comment or suggestion about del.icio.us: something you dislike, a story about how you use it, a feature we should add, or something like that. We’ll include a del.icio.us t-shirt for the people with the most useful and amusing notes, and they’ll entertain me while I suffer paper cuts from opening a zillion envelopes.

Britta Gustafson
community manager intern

55 comments August 17th, 2007

what is web 2.0?

There has been lot of discussion about what Web 2.0 really is, so we thought we’d use the power of Web 2.0 itself to come up with the answer, and here it is:

42.

Just kidding. What we actually did was take a look at all the tag data going back to February 2004 (the month of the first use of Web 2.0 as a tag on del.icio.us), and analyzed all the bookmarks and tags related to the term. We can report that as of October 31, 2005 there have been over 230,000 separate bookmarks and over 7,000 unique tags associated with the term “Web 2.0” by del.icio.us users. So for this exercise, we lopped off the really long tail and normalized some similar terms (e.g. combining blog, blogs, and blogging), and came up with this snapshot of what Web 2.0 REALLY is – at least according to del.icio.us users’ most popular tags through the end of October 2005:

Other notable tags included rubyonrails (1.8%), del.icio.us (1.6%), folksonomy (1.4%), community (1.1%), wiki (.9%), flickr (.8%), free (.7%), trends (.6%), flock (.4%) and googlemaps (.3%).

So there you have it - interesting, but it still seems to fall short of a definitive answer. Maybe the blinding flash of the obvious is that Web 2.0 is best defined as arguing about what Web 2.0 is really about.

30 comments November 12th, 2005

some noises we make while coding

“hurrrrrr”

“whuh?”

“whelmed”

“buh?”

update: we also go “mrfl.” thanks ray!

update 2: “grn” is frequently uttered. thanks, john!

update 3: “hlagaglhalgahlghlag”

34 comments May 11th, 2005