By Rudolf Ammann · November 19, 2005
The Dekita P2P Exchange is an initiative that aims to raise the visibility of P2P projects that EFL/ESL students are engaged in, worldwide, at any given time. Instead of building a central database with a Web interface, we chose a distributed approach to achieve our goal and built the initiative on top of Delicious, the “social bookmark manager”.
To understand how it works, you will need to understand Delicious.
Delicious provides an answer to a basic question: how do we organize links? (Or bookmarks, if you want to call them that.) The answer that Delicious provides isn’t the one that most of us will spontaneously expect: it isn’t hierarchical.
Let me start with the expectation that order should be hierarchical.
If you’ve ever been asked to write an academic paper, you already know what hierarchical categorization is: your paper will have a number of sections, each section divided into sub-sections, etc. etc. You may have been asked to use decimal classification to make the structure explicit.
Libraries structure much larger bodies of text hierarchically too. They may use the Dewey Decimal Classification
The Dewey system has ten main classes:
Each of these classes has ten divisions, and these divisions are further divided—and then further divided: it aims to be a full, hierarchical representation of human knowledge.
As computer users we’re also familiar with hierarchies: to date, all operating systems in general use rely on file systems that are structured hierarchically. We visually represent this hierarchical structure with folders.
The expectation that order is hierarchical also led Yahoo, when in 1994 it set out to organize the Web, to set up shop as a hierarchical directory.
Like all the big names in the search industry, Yahoo has abandoned the idea of a hierarchical directory in favor of an algorithm that ranks links according to relevance to a search query. But back in the day, Yahoo search queries referenced its directory. The directory is still available: you can go and move up and down the hierarchy looking for stuff.
While the search industry has moved on from structuring information hierarchically, many people who run their own personal sites haven’t—their link pages are likely to be structured hierarchically—they’re narrower hierarchies and shallower hierarchies than Yahoo’s, but they’re hierarchies nevertheless: a link on Links Page goes into one category and sits there.
Delicious doesn’t do hierarchic. It relies on an indexing tool called tags. Tags, generally speaking, allow users to organise objects within discrete databases or, in some cases, across the Internet. On Delicious, they allow users to organise the links (or “bookmarks”) they post.
Tags are metadata that users assign. Flickr may be the best-known site that employs them.
Tags create a non-hierarchical, flat namespace that can be represented in various ways: in tag clouds that correlate a tag’s font size to its popularity (the more popular the bigger), they can be sorted alphabetically, represented in proximity to related tags, etc.
With tags, users don’t have to fit things into the pigeonholes of a pre-existing order; they create order on the fly. If they feel an item can be categorised in more than one way, they apply more than one tag.
Thus, instead of laboriously inserting a link under the correct heading of a links list, or maintaining a list of categories in their browser, they just post them to Delicious with a few click, and with a few more clicks add existing tags or type up new ones.
Here’s an example of a Link posted to del.icio.us/dekita, tagged as social-software. Simply click on “social-software”, and you’ll get to a page that lists all links tagged “social-software” on Delicious/Dekita, from where you can go on to another page listing all links tagged “social-software” throughout Delicious. Both pages can be subscribed to via an RSS feed. (Flickr users will notice a similarity.)
As yet, Delicious doesn’t formally qualify as a social networking site because it doesn’t have the user management tools and the groups and etceteras that social networking sites use.
However, its self-description as a “social bookmark manager” is a good fit: users do share their links with others, and browsing other users’ link collections is a large part of Delicous’s attraction: while search engine results come with the authority of the whole Web’s linking behaviour (as filtered through the search engine’s algorithm), each Delicious collection comes with the authority of a real human being—and you will quickly find people who are interested in the things you are interested in because they collect the same links that you do: 15 other Delicious users currently link to our sample link—it might might be tempting (and sometimes rewarding) to go and look what other stuff they link to. Chances are some of them have good tastes in links.
The Dekita P2P Exchange engages in what Adam Mathes describes as an “unanticipated use” of tagging: we’re trying to support “communication and ad-hoc group formation facilitated through metadata.”
That’s a bit of a mouthful, but it’s less complicated than it sounds.
The Exchange rests on a simple idea: propose a new Delicious tag reserved for EFL/ESL projects that are open to the public and that invite participation. Let that tag allow interested parties to find those projects.
The Dekita P2P Exchange proposes that you should tag an open EFL/ESL project with P2P-EFL-ESL-X whenever you see one. If you do, we will immediately notice because we subscribe to the feed for the tag.
This feed is available at http://del.icio.us/tag/P2P-EFL-ESL-X: it includes every link that gets tagged as P2P-EFL-ESL-X anywhere on Delicious.
Think of this feed as the bush drum that lets everyone know about P2P EFL/ESL projects.
There’s a refinement, however, that we would like to propose as well: we would like teachers to create course pages that can be linked to.
A course page should be a single page with a linkable URL,, which makes it more useful and easier to point to than a mere mention and a blogroll somewhere in a teacher’s sidebar. It should also include a minimal amount of information about a course: We call this information the “must-have” data:
This information should allow anyone to gain an immediate idea of the course. Of course you are free to add more information.
You might want to link back to the P2P Exchange from your course information page. In that case you can use the handy button we provide; spread the idea!
If you do provide such a page for your course, we will link to it from http://del.icio.us/dekita/P2P-EFL-ESL-X. To let us know about it, simply tag your page as P2P-EFL-ESL-X on your own Delicious site or else drop us a note and give us the link.
The feed generated from that page will also be displayed in the right sidebar both on the Dekita P2P Exchange and on the Dekita front page.
If the initiative catches on, we will not only be able to raise the visibility of the projects in question, we will facilitate communication between our students and the rest of the world.
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