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Abstract:
Social networks and collaborative tagging systems are rapidly
gaining popularity as a primary means for storing and sharing data among
friends, family, colleagues, or perfect strangers as long as they have common
interests. del.icio.us is a social network where people store and share their
personal bookmarks. Most importantly, users tag their bookmarks for ease of
information dissemination and later look up. However, it is the friendship
links, that make delicious a social network. They exist independently of the
set of bookmarks that belong to the users and have no relation to the tags
typically assigned to the bookmarks. To study the interaction among users, the
strength of the existing links and their hidden meaning, we introduce
implicit links in the network. These links connect only highly “similar” users.
Here, similarity can reflect different aspects of the user’s profile that makes
her similar to any other user, such as number of shared bookmarks, or
similarity of their tags clouds. We investigate the question whether friends
have common interests, we gain additional insights on the strategies that users
use to assign tags to their bookmarks, and we demonstrate that the graphs
formed by implicit links have unique properties differing from binomial random
graphs or random graphs with an expected power-law degree distribution.