Delicious Numbers

I'm working on a mini-paper that examines my usage of the social bookmarking tool, Delicious. I've blogged before (Quality Ingredients Make Bookmarks Delicious) on my great love and admiration for Delicious. Beyond that, I haven't really put the microscope - or calculator - to my usage.

I assembled a few of my usage stats which I think reveals patterns to my behaviour. They may be of interest only to me, but I do think they qualify me as a power user.

My Delicious Stats:

• Months of membership: 47
• Bookmarks: 3475
• Average bookmarks per month: 74
  
• Tags: 698
• Tags used only once: 95 (I like highly-specific tags, but clearly I need to prune)
  
• Untagged bookmarks: 14 (some how I missed these as I always try to find some tag)
  
• Tag Bundles: 16
  
• Unbundled tags: 20 (haven't rounded up the scragglers for awhile)
  
• Average number of tags in a bundle: 59 (range is from 7 to 281)
  
• Users in my network: 20 (I don't network very much)
• My fans: 8 (no one appreciates my genius)
• #1 tag: "net news" with 637 bookmarks (I use it for my news feed here on the right)
• #2 tag: "web accessibility", 208 (a research interest and subject of my MA thesis)
• #3 tag: "Toronto", 204 (I love my city)
• #4 tag: "web 2.0", 177 (even I'm sick of this term)
• #5 tag: "Internet" 140

In the past six months:

• Bookmarks: 421
• Average bookmarks per month: 70
• Range: 43 (February) to 121 (June - all the Foursquare research)
  
• Average number of days I bookmarked per month: 13
• Average number of bookmarks per month based on days I bookmarked: 5.2
• Average number of bookmarks per month overall: 2.3

I did a historical cross-section of the past four Mays (no special reason for selecting May) that I've been a member:

• Bookmarks for Mays: 219
  
• Average bookmarks per May: 55
  
• Range: 4 (2007) to 126 (2008)
  
• Average number of days I bookmarked per May: 10
• Average number of bookmarks per month based on days I bookmarked: 4.3
  
• Average number of bookmarks per May day overall: 1.8

I wanted to figure out my use of tags per bookmark and how many other people were bookmarking resources I bookmarked. This was time-consuming to determine, so I selected one month, April 2010, that seemed to be average in that I had no special activities or projects that month:

• Average number of tags used per resource: 2.09
• Range of number of tags used: 1 to 5
• Average number of people that bookmarked a resource I did: 83
• Range of number of people bookmarking: 0 to 1990 (the latter for Shape Collage)
  
• Number of times I was the only person ever to bookmark a resource: 26 (out of 70 for the month)
  

I also tried to examine my bookmarking for personal versus professional usage but it was too difficult to neatly classify many of them.

It appears that my usage really fluctuates depending on current projects I have or events. It does appear that I bookmark approximately once every three days and that when I do I tend to bookmark 5 items using 2 tags each. Apparently, I also bookmark a fair number of resources that no one else has found (or cares about).

And finally...

• My bookmarks using "Delicious": 24
• My bookmarks using "glenfarrelly": 68