September 16th, 2005

Big Time Research on Tagging

by Joshua Porter  |   1 Comment  |  shortlink: http://bokardo.com/p/216

(via Infodesign) In The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs examine folksonomies. From the abstract:

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we 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.”

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Comments

1.  CM Harrington 2:10pm, Fri 16th, 2005

I’m on holiday at the moment in Portland, Oregon, and while I was on the plane, I decided to write a few hundred words on tagging. It’s not meant to be anything nearly as in-depth as this seems to be (haven’t RTFA’d yet), but it does contain some observations on the various forms of tagging, in which I divide tagging into “author” and “user”, where user is further divided between “public” and “private”. Anyway, give it a read, if you’d like.

http://blocklevel.com/weblog/information_architecture/tag_youre_it/