Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Social-Community features enable the users to cre-
ate “friendship” relations with each other (which
can be unilateral or mutual) or to create groups of
topical interests.A number of social bookmarking
applications have been recently launched. Systems
such as
delicious
are meant to be used as general
bookmark organization and sharing applications,
while there are also social bookmarking applica-
tions focused on online news such as
Digg
and
newsvine
, and even niche bookmarking services
such as
CiteULike
, used only for bookmarking
citations to research articles. Table 1 lists some of
the most popular SBS along with their features.
There has been a recent surge in the usage of
social bookmarking applications, many of which
currently attract several million of unique users per
month.An illustrative overview of usage statistics
pertaining to the most popular SBS is provided
in Table 2, where the top 10 social bookmarking
applications are ranked based on the number of
unique monthly visitors they attract. Several ad-
ditional web popularity metrics are provided in
the same table, namely the number of inbound
links, the Google Page Rank and the Alexa Rank.
According to the table,
Digg
,
StumbleUpon
,
propeller and
reddit
are the most popular social
bookmarking applications in terms of the number
of unique visitors per month. Although
delicious
is the oldest bookmarking application from this
list and features the largest number of bookmarks,
it appears to attract a smaller number of visitors
than its main competitors.
The widespread and intense use of such appli-
cations is responsible for the ceaseless creation of
massive data sets where the content consumption
patterns of users are imprinted. The description
and analysis of the intricate phenomena related to
these patterns could provide answers to a series
of interesting questions:
•
What kinds of distributions emerge in
the content consumption behavior of the
masses?
How does the attention attracted by a par-
•
ticular online resource evolve over time?
Is there correlation between the content of
•
a resource (semantics) and its popularity?
What is the impact of social networking on
•
the consumption of online content?
This chapter provides insights into such ques-
tions by investigating recent and ongoing research
Table 2. Top 10 Social Bookmarking services ranked by averaging the number of unique visitors as
provided by Compete
2
and Quantcast
3
. The number of inbound links was collected from Yahoo! Site
Explorer. The data were collected in June 2008.
Monthly Visitors
Page
Rank
Alexa Rank
Site
Inbound Links
Compete
Quantcast
Digg
23,988,437
(1)
19,906,963
(1)
27,589,161 (6)
8
114
StumbleUpon
2,338,242 (3)
1,331,110 (3)
160,863,707 (2)
8
372
propeller
1,521,706 (5)
6,055,679 (2)
8,590,778 (7)
7
876
reddit
2,489,583 (2)
1,115,655 (5)
4,859,451 (8)
8
4,074
fark
368,566 (7)
1,235,481 (4)
2,915,127 (9)
5
1,938
newsvine
625,115 (6)
986,471 (6)
66,154,514 (3)
8
6,923
delicious
1,632,204 (4)
420,043 (9)
462,168,833
(1)
9
1,161
blinklist
307,673 (9)
510,838 (7)
43,226,590 (5)
7
5,613
clipmarks
322,011 (8)
448,437 (8)
460,278 (10)
6
6,208
furl
153,987 (10)
79,462 (10)
60,312,568 ()
8
15,914
Search WWH ::
Custom Search