del.icio.us visualization
![Social bookmarking tools are very popular nowadays. In most tools, users tag the bookmarks to describe them. Therefore, it is often hard for users to discover implicit structures between tags, users and bookmarks. We think that this is essential for both end users to discover new bookmarks that could be of interest to them, and for
researchers who want to study how people use social information retrieval tools. In this work, a cluster map visualisation technique is customized to enable users to explore social bookmarks in the del.icio.us system. The design of our visualisation aims to automatically identify tag and community structures, and visualises these structures in order to increase the users awareness of them.
This application can be tested online by clicking below on the hyperlink which starts the java webstart application. The program starts by asking for a del.icio.us username and then
loads the tags and bookmarks of this user,
loads the tags and bookmarks of the users in the network of this user,
loads the tags and bookmarks of the users that are a fan of this user.
You can always add a new user with all this data by using the menu or by
right-clicking on a user in the visualisation.
A video demo is available in mov-format (Quicktime compressor needed) that can be downloaded here (33,9Mb).
Try to run the program and afterwards please fill in the online survey by browsing to this webpage. Any other feedback on this tool can be sent to joris.klerkx[at]cs.kuleuven.be and is much appreciated!
This tool is created by Joris Klerkx at the department of Computerscience at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. It makes use of the information visualization infrastructure that was created to be able to rapidly experiment with existing information visualization techinques and different datasets. For this tool, we plugged in the Aduna Clustermap library in our framework to enable an exploration tool of social bookmarks of del.icio.us.
A paper “Visualizing Social Bookmarks” to explain the tool has been published online as EC-TEL ’07 workshop proceedings, as part of the CEUR Workshop proceedings series. CEUR-WS.org is a recognised ISSN publication series, with ISSN 1613-0073. An early version of this paper can be downloaded here](del.icou.us%20visualization_files/shapeimage_1.png)
