Study on Tagging

Patterns and inconsistencies in collaborative tagging systems, and examination of tagging practices

Examination of social bookmarking systems compared with classic taxonomy.

Definition of terms:
Tagging – act of generating a dynamic taxonomy or folksonomy.
Tagging – alternative format Tag Cloud
Post is the measure in study – consists of actual tagging of a document.

Citeulike and Del.io.us
Citeulike - Academic use – more often used by

Controversy

Tagging is Good: dynamiuc distributed classification, related tag networks, tag clouds show extent of collection, user terminology, diversity, consensus by active users

Tagging is Bad: mob indexing, no controlled vocabulary, poor browsing experience, no thesaurus, consensus by a mob is no consensus

Research Questions
What patterns of tagging emerged? Frequency and co-word analysis.
What extent do these enhance the traditional methods?
What extent do they defy the traditional methods?

Study protocol
Used 64 URL’s on Del.icio.us

Analysis
58,728 posts
165,831 tags
Number of unique tags 18,904
Per URL max 1252, min 23
Average posts per url 917
Max 5172, min 53
Average tags per URL 295
Max 13809 min 49

Interesting to see that even with 49 tags, consensus started to form.
6% do not tag
Users use 1-3 tags 65%

High Frequency Tags
Productivity
Gtd
Lifehacks
Tools
Web2.0
Web
Organization
Css
Blog
Wiki

Issues with tags

Spelling variations occurred

A number of synonyms or related terms

Acronyms

Cotag Graphs
Looking at where tags are clustered together to determine when things belong together.
They did not see things clustering together well.

Non Subject Tags
Affective Tags
Cool – 906 occurrences
Time and Task Tags
Toread: 939 occurrences
3049 unique tags identified as time and task 16%

Intrinsically time sensitive
Express response for user
Users were not consistent in applying tags, or in the spelling of tags, etc.
Users demand further finer grained indexing that taxonomists usually apply