Research on social browsing
On someone’s blog today I saw a link to this blog post, Social browsing vs. technology-enabled navigation:
The research found that the contact lists is what forms the social network backbone of the site - and they call this new way in which people interact with information social browsing.
Apparently people use social browsing more so than searching for information using tags, groups, calendar, maps or any of the other ways through which Flickr offers users to search for subscribe to content.
The research in question is this paper, Social browsing on Flickr [pdf]. The blog post also references this paper, Social Networks and Social Information Filtering on Digg [pdf].
I’ll try and read those on the plane tomorrow.