James Melzer reminds us about Sturgeon’s Revelation that 90% of everything is crud, including del.icio.us bookmarks.

The Best of del.icio.us

“I've been watching del.icio.us develop and flourish for while now. Ironically, the wisdom of crowds really isn't all it's cracked up to be. Maybe all web apps experience this same effect: the dark side of the long-tail. Users test out the app and abandon their accounts. Spammers flit from one account to the next like bees pollinating flowers. Whatever the reason, there is a lot of junk in del.icio.us. The majority of users don't tag their bookmarks at all, which begs the question why they are using it in the first place. I don't have an answer to that question, so I will suggest what I think is a more important question: Given that a majority of users are not contributing anything (or are actively sabotaging) the usefulness of this collective tool, how do we use the tool effectively in spite of them?

Here's what I think: We actively follow expert users and ignore everyone else. There are a number of expert folks out there who tag well and tag a lot. They use sophisticated classification techniques. They tag interesting things before anyone else. And they supplement their distinquishing metadata with descriptive metadata.

I have collected together a representative sample of these power users. Take a minute and look at how they use the tool….” [Getting My Bearings]

It would be interesting to watch how librarians use del.icio.us and to track the power librarian users. Is there any more wisdom in that crowd? Are there power librarian users the rest of us can