Del.icio.us research

I was just wandering around Del.icio.us a bit and I'm sure I gave one or more of their servers a workout. I had an idea: who were the first people to bookmark the web's most popular sites?

On a whim, I started with Technorati. I searched del.icio.us for it and clicked on the red "4124 people" link to see the Technorati : Home url page. After a bit of downloading(that's a big page!) I scrolled to the bottom and found it was a guy named angusf.

Then I looked through some of his earliest bookmarks and began searching for even earlier bookmarks. The earliest one I found was way back in 6-11-2000 by ericbogs. It was my.yahoo.com. I think it just may be the earliest bookmark on del.icio.us and I have a feeling it's a test bookmark since I don't think has been running since 2000.

The Del.icio.us database is amazing...here are some other query ideas:

Of people's first 10 bookmarks, what are the top 100 to appear for the most users?

Compare Alexa's top 100 list for daily reach and traffic with the #s for bookmarks in the del.icio.us database. The question I would be asking is, do bookmarks correlate well with traffic?

Finally, it would be interesting to follow through and build a list of the first users to bookmark each of Alexa's top 100.

There are litterally millions of research ideas on the del.icio.us database and as long as you take care and use the information responsibly we can probably all learn quite a bit about ourselves from this large, open data store.