Applying social bookmarking to collective information searching (CIS): An analysis of behavioral pattern and peer interaction for co-exploring quality online resources

With the advancement of Web 2.0 applications, this study aims to advocate that social bookmarking (SB) applications could support mutual exchange of finding information in a manner of collective information searching (CIS). A social bookmarking system, namely ‘WeShare,’ was developed, and conducted with 127 junior high school students for performing the given assignment in this study. The participants’ activities of collecting and reviewing relevant information were traced by log data for later analysis. To initially unveil the participants’ behaviors in the use of social bookmarking for co-exploring the Internet resources, this study proposed some quantitative indicators to represent students’ personal contributions (‘Bookmarks from the Internet,’ ‘Bookmarks from WeShare,’ ‘Annotations on personal bookmarks,’ ‘Comments on others’ bookmarks’) and peer feedback (‘The number of bookmarks collected by peers,’ ‘The number of bookmarks commented on by peers,’ ‘The number of comments from peers’). By the method of cluster analysis, some behavioral patterns regarding how participants collectively search the Internet by use of WeShare were identified. Furthermore, the findings suggest that personal contributions to citing and commenting on peers’ bookmarks are important to the advancement of collective information searching activities for finding quality information on the Internet.