Learning about eParticipation through social bookmarking

19. May 2009 – 17:43 by POLITECH

 

Last December, a post was published under the title How we could syndicate eParticipation related resources really simple.

 In his post, we’ve learned about social bookmarking and especially delicious.com.

Delicious.com is a Yahoo service allowing people to save their favorites online and share them with the community.

This post is going more into details regarding delicious.com and e-Participation

 According to my own experience, delicious.com can be an excellent alternative to … Google. Indeed, if used smartly, it is possible to find very quickly and easily the sites you are looking for.

The idea is the following: people with the same interest are looking for the same websites. When they have found a good source of information, they save the URL, write some notes, share it with their peers. You may actually find out that an expert in the field is a person who has a large number of favorites with relevant tags and interesting notes.

So, the alternative to Google is to find these people and follow their findings.

This way, you may be sure that you can keep up to date with the most interesting stuff.

It is worth it becoming part of their network and it is even better if you start yourself by giving to this expert some information. Even if you are just a beginner, you may still be able to contribute to the community.

 In our case, let’s see what the status of eParticipation is in Delicious.

 A first task when looking for some information is to decide upon various key words to insert in the search field.

First of all, should we use eParticipation, e-Participation or both?

According to the tag cloud of Pep-net website, we can see that the word eParticipation is much more popular than e-Participation.

Is it the same on Delicious?

The way to find it is to lookup the following URLs:

https://delicious.com/tag/eparticipation

vs.

https://delicious.com/tag/e-participation

It says that there are 733 bookmarks with the tag e-participation whereas there are 465 bookmarks with the tag eparticipation.

What is the meaning of it?

Contrarily to the Pepnet community, the community of Delicious.com is using more the tag e-participation than eparticipation.

 It is therefore important to also include this popular tag when looking for relevant information.

 Another aspect is to look at the newest websites that are listed. Since delicious.com saves the dates of the saving of each website, the first sites that are on the list are the most recent ones. It is a good idea as it was suggested in the previous post, to use RSS for updates.

Another feature is to use the popular tag so that you can see what the most popular sites are. It may not mean that they are the best sites but in our opinion it is an important parameter taking into account the high level of Delicious users.

In order to speed up the search process, it is a good idea to check the notes that people have written about the site they have saved. This way, you may reduce the number of sites that you go to and select the sites with the most relevant notes.

 When looking for sites in a specific language, it is good to follow the right people. For instance, if you are speaking German, then we can see that tbonnemann has been saving recently a number of German websites about e-Participation. He is actually a very heavy user of Delicious since we can see that he or she has saved 8405 sites so far.

Along the eParticipation tag, we can check on his/her page the other tags that are being used.

 Is there a way to find out the identity of this person and make a contact?

Well, not directly.

In our case, when googling tbonnemann, we quickly find his blog (in English), his name : Tim Bonnemann and an interesting post on eDemocracyCamp ‘09 .

 Comments are welcome.

Philippe Scheimann

POLITECH INSTITUTE