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October 6th, 2005
Web2Con: Emergent Tags
by Joshua Porter | 
5 Comments
The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference.
Closely related to the popularity decay idea is the idea of emergent tags. Emergent tags are those tags that become more popular over time.
The interesting thing about emergent tags is that they’re rare, but hugely valuable.
Why are they rare? Well, because human activity is slow to change: we do a lot of the same things that we’ve always done. Therefore, tags like “wedding” or “cameraphone” or “web” will be popular for a long time, because those tags represent certain ideas that are central to many people’s lives right now.
But take a tag like “Ajax”, which emerged over the last few months after Jesse James Garrett dreamt it up around the beginning of the year. This tag didn’t exist before that, or if did it meant something other than Asynchronous Javascript and XML.
Why are emergent tags valuable? Well, they’re valuable because they show trends of change. To give you an example of how useful this can be, Tim O’Reilly said in his opening talk that by watching the emergence of the Ajax tag they could predict that if O’Reilly published books about Ajax, readers would gobble them up. And judging by the number of people at this Conference who are building applications in Ajax, and the number of folks I’ve talked to who have shiny new Ajax books, this certainly is the case.
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Web2Con: Popularity Decay in TaggingABOUT
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Comments ( 5 Responses so far )
1. Alex Barnett on October 8th, 2005 (Comment) #
nice post Joshua.
Related thoughts here.
On emergent tags and memetic connectivity
2. Coelomic on January 2nd, 2006 (Comment) #
Excellent write-up. I do agree that emergent tags are very interesting. Probably there should be a way by which del.icio.us keep track of them. Related post here
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3. vanderwal on January 8th, 2006 (Comment) #
I am not so sure emergent tags are rare. Tags are an explicit statement of vocabulary terms used to identify an object for refindability. Vocabulary is an implicit reflection of the community the person tagging belongs to.
How do vocabulary and tags get emergent qualities? There are few trajectories: 1) A new coinage is created, which provides a new understanding for actions or things that are distinct and need to have their own term to make it easier to point to; 2) A new coinage to that is simple and used to replace a more complicated or technical term, e.g. AJAX is used to supplant XMLHTTPRequest a technology that has been around many years; 3) Adopting terms from other cultures or disciplines, which happens in the sciences as the more popular terms are adopted to replace more arcane terms and this makes communication between scientist and those outside the discipline easier; 4) Slang from alternative/sub cultures becomes adopted by the mainstream cultures, other alternative/sub cultures, or professional disciplines.
This emergent pattern is continually happening, but more so in some communities than others. A folksonomy helps track this shifting of patterns over time. Through time series we should be able to see shifting of usage patterns of terms. In some cultures and disciplines it is slow and it others it is more rapid.
To understand what is going on we need to stop looking at the global and look at the communities. With Broad Folksonomies that communities (whether explicit or implicit) can be identified by looking at the individual as a data point as they tag objects. Many of the problems in understanding this comes from top-down pattern identification where we try to place people in out preconceived categories. The solution seems to lie in a more granular social network tracking and bottom-up clustering based on an individual’s similar tagging the same objects.
Part of the folksonomy tagging is also people learning what others have called the term, which seems to cause a flattening of understanding. This could lead to adopting more standard terms across cultures, which is initially emergent in nature with in these cultures. I think this is some of what we are seeing on a global scale with global media outlets (satellite broadcast and the internet play large roles) making
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