web 2.0 part ix

recently submitted my final (apart from the End of Year show) college assignment, an essay for the Research Techniques module. I'd chosen to adopt an on-going study of the potential implications for designers of Web 2.0.

I've posted about this topic at infrequent intervals (Web 2.0, doing my bit for Web 2.0, the benefits of an RSS feeder, more on RSS, further thoughts on RSS, the good and not-so-good of Web 2.0, becoming a geek, and I'll tag the high road), and, indeed, I included these excerpts from my blog as an appendix to the essay.

If I'd written this post about my conclusions earlier, I could have included it as well, but the assessors may read it anyway if they choose to look at this blog. By voluntarily opening up my blog to them, I'm contributing, in a very small way, to what I see as a future phase of the Web, but that's the subject of another post.

So what did I discover about Web 2.0?

Let's start with del.icio.us. For six months, I kept a weekly record (well, most weeks, except towards the end when I became distracted by other assignments) of the number of other people linking to sites I had bookmarked as favourites using del.icio.us - 79 sites in total by the end of the process.

In the vast majority of cases (61), the number of links increased, usually steadily and often by significant amounts every week. The highest percentage increase was the Guardian's Technology site, which jumped from 10 to 66 links, while the highest absolute increase was the Web Developers' Handbook, leaping from 3,483 to 9,337.

17 of the remaining 18 sites stayed at 0. Only 1 site ended the survey with fewer links than at the start, and that was a decrease of only one, though six sites peaked then declined slightly.

This was by no means a statistically valid test, but it would be interesting to do this sort of thing again then run some statistical analysis to see if there is an underlying pattern.

To be continued (possibly).

Tags: web 2.0 | del.icio.us | links