Following them is good, but finding them to begin with is a challenge, too.

I’ve done this very thing for a while now (follow expert users), and that’s actually how I found you. :-) I was looking around del.icio.us to see how people tagged stuff that they wanted to read later. I found lots of variations, but !toread seemed best. I checked out who used those tags. When I saw the other tags you had, I added you to my del.icio.us inbox.

I now watch both your tags and your bookmarks, but watching the tags provides some interesting insights into convention and organization. Excellent summary. Thanks for your work!

As Donna pointed out, a lot of IA (or UX or whatever) folks produce top-quality del.icio.us links.

health, realitytv, disaster, cookies, medicine, collaboration, email, ajax, spreadsheet, notes

RealityTV? Really? I bookmark a lot of mandolin stuff, but I don’t even show up in a search on the mandolin tag. Compared to some of the other tags I use (eg “design” and “business”) it seems like “mandolin” is pretty obscure.

I then noticed that my bookmarks were imported “indirectly” into CollaborativeRank. The FAQ distinguishes them:

“Direct” bookmark import for a user means that the del.icio.us rss feed for that user is sampled to import that user’s bookmarks.

“Indirect” bookmark import for a user means that the del.icio.us rss feed for that user is not sampled, so the bookmarks for that user are imported when they happen to be found in the rss feeds for the tags that are sampled.

Clearly, “direct” bookmark import is likely to import quite a lot more of your bookmarks.

One way to get “direct” bookmark import is to simply bookmark CollaborativeRank on del.icio.us.

This means that the rankings are skewed based on whether your bookmarks were imported directly or indirectly, which seems to throw all this data (and its utility) into question.

I’m still a little surprised that when I suggested this type of communal tagging, it came under some fire as not within the spirit of folksonomic tagging (see comments in http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/bloug_archive/000363.html ). I still find it ironic to be criticized for using a tool for group benefit, especially when it doesn’t impact others. And really ironic to be told, in a top-down way, how to use and not use a tool that’s based on a grass roots philosophy.

In any case, sharing a tag this way is proving to be a hugely useful monitoring tool. I highly encourage it!

This enables me to find folks like Lou who bookmark some of the same things I do.

And that is usually people I know, like Dan and Peter and Thomas and you. So what is funny about that is that it wraps back to lovely, human contacts.

Also, try the search (which has rss btw). You might find it more helpful than the expert ranking.