Pito Salas of BlogBridge sent me a link to a great article on the concepts behind and within tagging, The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems by Scott Golder and Bernardo A. Huberman, Information Dynamics Laboratory, HP Labs. They describe collaborative tagging as the “process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content.” This is what is commonly referred to as tagging at the moment and what was popularized by sites such as del.icio.us and Flickr. In the abstract write that they “discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”
The entire article is worth going through. They compare the usefulness of conventional hierarchical taxonomies to more free-from tagging which is neither hierarchical or exclusive in its categorization. This allows tagging to identify an article to being about many things simultaneously, which is both a good and bad thing. On one hand it makes it more likely to be found through various search terms. On the other hand it can lead to chaos. All of this is a byproduct of the imperfect relationship of language and thought which complicates attempts at categorization.
The authors looked at tagging patterns within del.icio.us. They found a number of uses for tags: what it is about, what it is, who owns it, refining categories, identifying characteristics, self reference, and task organizing. Users have a strong bias toward using the more general tags first, such as the first four uses. Naturally, there are also more commonalities between users on these first four, rather than the more personal uses in the last three. They also found some stable patterns in tagging within and between individuals. The stable across individuals is explained by the features of del.icio.us which show prior tags for commonly tagged urls and by the common background of many users.
Earlier, I did a brief general introduction to tagging.
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