De.li.cious & Diigo
Both of them are social bookmarking service sites, which according to Massa’s article, belong to the type of Opinions and Activities Sharing Sites. In his article, Massa mentioned about De.li.cious and referred it as “the act of trusting takes the form of subscribing”, which could create a loyal relationship between users or users and their interested topics. It is interesting though, despite the fact that Diigo doesn’t have the function of subscribing to a specific user or topic, both sites of De.li.cious and Diigo have other trust mechanisms in work.
My first experience of social bookmarking service sites started with De.li.cious, which I also considered the most popular one (even Diigo has a tool called “Import From Delicious”). In De.li.cious, there are mainly four functions for registered users. First, users can browse for recent (“Fresh”) or popular (“Hotlist”) bookmarks. Second, users can search for bookmarks with their interests by typing in a specific tag. Third, users can create their own list of bookmarks and use De.li.cous either as a virtual disk to store this information or as a tool to share their opinions of certain websites. At last, being an online community, users can also “follow” specific users or topics, create their own network based on mutual interests. In general, this is a site mostly driven by people’s information needs, even it is indeed an online community and could engender relationship between users, the social capitals that are generated here are largely made up of bridging ones, which is “weak” but “broad”. The trust mechanisms here, besides subscribing, also include networking and reputation.
The idea of networking, which is to form one’s own networks by adding people in De.li.cious, is more or less like the function of “grouping” in some other online communities. Given the fact that people are more likely to believe the ones that are like them more than the ones that have little or no similar interests or taste with them, users tend to “trust” the values or interestingness of the bookmarks that are provided by users in their own network. The other trust mechanism reputation, is what I consider as a combination of “celebrity effects” and “conformity” in an online community. On the “Hotlist” page, there is a list of popular bookmarks (depend on the number of users that saved them). From my own experience, I tend to believe these are the bookmarks that are more valuable – or at least not bored or offensive – comparing to the less noticed ones, because they have reputations.
Then, for the little experiment, I tried to pick several users who saved a “Hotlist” bookmark that I also find interesting, and add them in my network. After that, by checking my own network, which is composed by bookmarks that are created by my “network friends”, I could tell if this “network” function is working as a trust mechanism by the quantity and quality of the bookmarks in my network.
The first picture is a screen shot of the users who saved a popular bookmark named “chard and white bean stew”, which link to a delightful webpage of recipe with pictures (proved that “Hotlist” stuffs are good!). And by choosing three users who tag this bookmark as “recipe” (like what I will do), I added them to my network and got a list of their bookmarks that are mostly consist of websites or web pages of recipes – like what is shown in the second picture. It might seem not that convincing since there is only my own experience proving my hypothesis, but at least I think it is an attempt to test weather these trust mechanism is working or not in De.li.cious, and in my case, I think they are.
Diigo, the website who consider itself as a “Web Highlighter and Sticky Notes, Online Bookmarking and Annotation, Personal Learning Network” basically holds functions very similar to that of De.li.cious. But there are some other trust mechanisms working here.
Although not with the function of subscribing, Diigo does have a function call “follow me” that runs quite the similar mechanism as subscribing to a particular user. Users can also find a list of popular items and form their own network as well. It is even better when users can search for emails to see if their friends are in Diigo too or not. Further more, users can join or form their own group by topics and leave comments for each item in that group. Also, when users do a keyword search for any topic, the results will come out with a number of people that bookmarked it, which I think works like the action of rating it as “good”, hence makes the marked bookmark credible. Users can leave comments under each bookmark as well. Contrarily, when there is a bookmark that you think boring, or a particular user that you think is a spammer, you can also leave negative comments or “Flag” that user as spammer. Users can even “bury” a link by reporting to the community manager.
Another trust mechanism works in Diigo is that users can preview the webpage first when they click on the bookmark, and have a first impression weather it is a link they want to head to or not. This preview function, will somehow reduce the possibility of linking users to some commercial websites, and made the users trust more of the information Diigo is providing.
In general, I think the trust mechanism that Diigo use is better than those in De.li.cious, in terms of both quantity and quality. It is also a pity that users cannot sort the bookmarks by popularity in De.li.cious when the results are automatically sorted (descending) in Diigo. As in my case, the preview and comments in Diigo helped a lot when I’m making decisions. However, it might be easier for users if there is a rating scale to look at (like the stars on Ebay) other than reading the comments. And according to A Survey of Trust Use Modeling in Real Online Systems, “exploiting a negative trust statement” will be as helpful as the positive ones too. Although in Diigo, users can report an inappropriate link to the administrator, there are still chances that their claim won’t be approved.
The “searching for friends by email” function in Diigo is also a good try because users will feel good about this OC if they find someone they know offline is also using it. It is like the condition in The benefit of Facebook “Friends”: Social Capital and Collage Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites where the author made a hypothesis: “Intensity of Facebook use will be positively associated with individuals' perceived maintained social capital” and collage students use it to relief their “friendsickness”. In this case of bookmarking OCs, the “maintained social capital” will be helping users trust both the community more and the information their friend are promoting. A search for users in the same geographic area will be helpful too since there is a big chance people in the same neighborhood would have some topics and taste alike.
In addition, since bridging social capital is better for “information diffusion”, it is necessary to encourage or stimulate such weak-ties among the users. In On and Off the 'Net: Scales for Social Capital in an Online Era, among the four dimensions of measuring users bridging social capital, we can take the data from users “outward looking” and their connection with “a broad range of people” in De.li.cious and Diigo, and use it to analyze what kind of topics people like to take a peak at. I will also suggest a full profile to be displayed in order for users to “get to know new friends” and create some bridging social capital upon it.
At last, I find that in both De.li.cios and Diigo, the characteristic of the social roles is not clear. It is not like in some other OCs where there are formal roles, informal roles or critical roles and supporting roles. In these bookmarking OCs, users are mostly informal roles, even there is an administrator on the website, he is just “invisible” during the daily activities. However, if the key to a health community, according to A Conceptual and Operational Definition of ‘Social Role’ in Online Community, is the balanceable “interactions between formal and informal roles” and “how they affect the productivity and longevity” of the OC, it is a good way to keep users’ tracks in record, and entitle them different “positions” based on their posts. For example, a user who post too many spam will be a “spammer”, but if he started to contribute to the community, he might gain the title of contributor. At this time, there is the role of “group owner” in Diigo, who forms specific groups by topic and can comment on items in his own group.
An idea for the final project:
I’m still not very sure about the idea of entitling users by their activities, I know there are some online games that use this as a method to arrange the users by the time they spend online, like “starter”, ”skilled”, ”master”… But does it make sense for people in a bookmarking online community, or any other opinions and activities sharing sites? What’s more important is, if this is a working instrument, and users tend to believe the ones with higher rank, will it be abused?
