People, not machines, are the lifeblood of the information society
What do Buddhism, the unsolved problems of mathematics and home-made granola have in common? They might sound like ingredients for the next bestseller about a religious cover-up, but they are, in fact - at least among the group of people signed up to the del.icio.us social bookmarking service - the most popular topics on the web this morning.
del.icio.us (yes, it should start without a capital letter, and yes, those full stops are there for a reason) is a tool for storing your web bookmarks online. Download a little widget for your browser and, at the click of a button, you can mark a page to read later, storing it under a keyword (or "tag") of your choice. Your del.icio.us homepage is then accessible, like other web pages, from any computer plugged in to the internet. It is, in short, a perfect tool for anyone who uses the net for research.
At least that's what its creator, Josh Schachter, wants us to think. Schachter, a co-author of the cult blog Memepool, developed del.icio.us in 2003 and sold it to Yahoo! for an undisclosed, but most probably princely, sum at the end of last year. Memepool is a links blog - that is, a blog which consists mainly of links to other websites. It specialises in internet memes, which, as regular readers might recall, are items of cultural curiosity that spread like wildfire across the internet despite their random nature or ostensible banality.
What makes del.icio.us a social bookmarking site is that the pages you bookmark are fed into a central database and information about them is shared with other users. This means that del.icio.us knows, and displays in real time, which sites are currently most popular. Because you are more likely to use it to remember that odd little page you come across on how best to julienne a carrot than to bookmark your favourite sites (you know how to get to the New Statesman website without the help of a widget), it is excellent at picking up memes.
The accuracy of del.icio.us as an online augur relies on the profiles of its users. Currently, those users are of a technological bent. But its simple utility has helped it catch on with the non-techie crowd. The media, another category of people who do a lot of research online, will be next. In fact, if you want to know what's coming up in this column you could do worse than check http://del.icio.us/becky_hogge/NSideas.
The elegance and power of del.icio.us is that it has a double function: it provides users with a great tool, and then aggregates their input to create a secondary service. It reveals emergent patterns that algorithms alone could never reach. These kinds of sites (Flickr, another recent Yahoo! purchase, and Last.fm do the same thing for photos and music respectively) will be the lifeblood of the information society. And it's nice to know that people, not machines, are central to making them work.
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