Genre analysis of bookmarked webpages

Abstract

PurposeA total of 17 user‐compiled collections of webpages, comprising 833 bookmarked links in terms of genre, are studied. The purpose of this paper is to find out whether users tend to bookmark certain web genres more than others. Genre theory helps to make sense of the different pages included in these collections, and to classify them, according to their communicative purpose and salient non‐topical features, into blogs, search interfaces, articles, tutorials.Design/methodology/approachA total of 17 participants took part in the research by providing their collections of bookmark links. They were also interviewed about the reasons for bookmarking and to comment on their collections. Relying on the interview results and on the previous literature, the bookmarks were classified into four super‐genres: main or access pages, transactional pages, navigational pages, and content pages.FindingsThe results of the classification into web genres revealed a clear tendency to bookmark main pages, such as homepages, which accounted for 42 per cent of all bookmarked web links. Moreover, some aspects of relevance were highlighted such as the connections to use, time, and context, as well as to the main web activity (browsing or searching).Originality/valuePreviously, bookmarks have mostly been studied as tools for information reuse, but very rarely as sources of implicit relevance feedback. In addition, from the point of view of genre theory, this research shows the importance of relating web genres to users' intentions behind queries.

Online Information Sources Used in Hotel Bookings

“…Bilenko and White (2008) argue that users’ browsing activity reflects implicit topical relevancy of the visited pages. More recently, Montesi (2010) states that user relevance judgments can be inferred through the time spent reading a webpage, or actions such as clicking, printing, saving, or selecting. The relevance factor is highlighted by Taylor, Lewin, and Strutton (2011), who caution that the relevance of advertisements on social media sites cannot simply be measured in isolation and should be carefully aligned to the interests and motivations of individuals.…”

Blog, news, ecommerce: Does genre matter for taggers?

“…Researchers in LIS have suggested that genre may have implications for information seeking and retrieval (e.g., Crowston & Kwasnik, 2003;Freund, 2012;Montesi & Navarrete, 2008;Montesi, 2010;Rosso, 2005;Roussinov et al, 2001). Beghtol (2001) argued that genre analysis may be used to create a "framework of analysis for a domain" that can help "structure and interpret texts, events, ideas, decisions, explanations and every other human activity in that domain" (p. 19).…”

“…Studies of user-generated vocabularies have also suggested that users tend to employ genre related tags (e.g., Montesi, 2010;Munk & Mork, 2007). Munk and Mork's (2007b) quantitative analysis of 178,460 Delicious tags found that genre tags comprised 3.8% of the analyzed tags (p. 122), whereas Lamere's (2008) study of the 500 most frequently applied tags at Last.fm indicated that genre accounted for 68% of all tags assigned.…”