paper: Using Social Tagging to Improve Social Navigation

I have read the paper of David R. Millen and Jonathan Feinberg. The paper examined the use of a social bookmarking service to understand how social navigation is supported. In this paper, Social Navigation is the navigation that is driven by the action from other advice providers i.e list of favorite web sites.

Social Bookmarking System is introduced as an information tool to support the creation and categorization of collection of web resource as bookmarks. An example of social bookmarking system is Dogear that is a social bookmarking system for the enterprise. Dogear provides the following features for users.

• Users can create their personal bookmarks and share it with others. Bookmarks are stored in the central repository that can be browsed from any web-accessible computer.
• Tagging system is used to support organizing the personal bookmarks. Users assign their own keywords or tags to organize their bookmarks by their meaningful. Multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category, so they avoid the limitation of hierarchically organized folder of favorites.
• User interfaces involve social browsing of the bookmark space, i.e., Click user A reveals user A’s bookmark collections, Click tag T reveals bookmarks matching tag T.Users can see other information sources of interest by browsing through the entire bookmark collection.
  

The paper analyze the usage of social tagging for social navigation by integrating dogear with browser-based application by installation bookmarklet. The presence of other is a list of the active users and recent bookmarks included the owner. For ensuring appropriate behavior, users are authenticated against the corporate directory and used their real name. The distinction between public and private bookmarks builds trust and protects privacy policies. My library assists the way to personalize the navigation for individuals.

The interaction through social tagging is the clickable of tags. Furthermore, the system provides tag cloud to reveal the popular tags. By tag cloud, users can know the current popular issue. Tags in tag cloud are the first place to provide the benefit of social tagging. In each user's library, there is an individual tag cloud. Individual tag cloud reveals individual interest or the current interest.

Social Navigation in Dogear are Direct and Indirect social navigation. Direct social navigation is one or more advice providers suggest navigation directly (by email or chatting). By click user, it links to a bookmark to navigate his bookmarks collection. Indirect social navigation is the situation that navigation advice is inferred from historical traces left by others. By click other tag, it links to the same bookmark to navigate other bookmarks matching this tag.

The analyzed data came from users' actions (create, delete, edit, click bookmark).

• Evidence of social navigation is the number of times individuals looked at others’ bookmark collections.
• Evidence of what kind of tags is most often browsed is the number of tags that were most likely to be browsed occurred often in the bookmark collection.
  
• Evidence of tag clustering is that user who browsed one tag should be more likely to browsed related tags.
• Another is the consideration about whether users clicked through others’ bookmarks to see the original resource for social navigation.

In discussion, most visitors navigate others’ bookmarks collection by clicking one or more tags or users. Users look at others’ bookmarks collection more than browsing tag collection. This mechanism contributes the way to explore bookmark space. Users clicked displayed bookmark in others’ bookmarks collection to see the original resource. This method contributes information sharing.

The original paper can be found here .

Thank you for the authors. This paper provides the guidance for study about social navigation, social bookmarking systems and its usage pattern.