Link Mining for a Social Bookmarking Web Site

Social bookmarking tools enable users to save URLs for future reference, to create tags for annotating Web pages, and to share Web pages they found interesting with others. This paper presents a case study on the application of link mining to a social bookmarking Web site called del.icio.us. We investigated the user bookmarking and tagging behaviors and described several approaches to find surprising patterns in the data. We also identified the characteristics that made certain users more popular than others. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of using social bookmarks and tags for predicting mutual ties between users.