Needed a mental break from all the assessment stuff I’ve been working on, so I reached into my “to read” pile and pulled out a paper on incentives in social computing (pdf) that looks, in part, at how people use del.icio.us in information discovery.

The thing that stood out to me was this: People are much more likely to find information through a user than through a tag. Although tags get used to find pages bookmarked by oneself, finding pages bookmarked by others is usually done by subscribing to others’ feeds (here’s my network) or by clicking on the “saved by X others” link (an example).

First off, this is exactly how I use del.icio.us. On the rare occasions I’ve tried to do a search of the site as a whole it’s been worse than useless, and I’ve had the same difficulties with subscribing to tags as the authors describe.

However, they do seem to downplay the importance of tags for the social aspect of the site — something which does not conform to my own use. When I browse through the bookmarks in my network, I use the tags to help decide whether it’s something in which I’m interested. Since site titles can be misleading or uninformative, and most people do not regularly add user notes for their bookmarks, tags are often the only way I have of judging the usefulness of a site without clicking through.

I also use tags when deciding whether to add someone to my network if I don’t know them in real life or through their blog. For example, go back to the last link above and look at the list of people who have bookmarked the site. See all the ones with “system: unfiled” next to the user name? That means the user didn’t bother to add tags. No point in looking at their bookmarks if I’m not going to be able to tell what they’re about! Also, I’m more likely to add someone to my network if they have their tags organized into folders — this makes it much easier for me to see how much overlap there is in our interests.

So even though tags aren’t helpful when I’m searching other people’s bookmarks, they are a big part of how I make judgment calls when browsing. But maybe that’s just the librarian in me?