Comments on: Web2Con: Emergent Tags

By: WordWorks » Search 3.0

WordWorks » Search 3.0 — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 15:23:32 +0000

[...] The other craze on the internet now is “interesting links”. More people are turning to the web to serve as a source of entertainment and part of the trend is to search for “cool links”. Unfortunately typing “cool links” into Google is not what I mean. A whole array of service have sprung up based on the idea. Look at ” Del.icio.us”, “Digg” and the like. It would be so easy for Google, Yahoo and the like to come up with a page of interesting links gleaned from their daily, monthly and annual searches. What is very markedly absent from my favourite search engine “Google” is the lack of the human element. They are not big fans of human involvement in providing search results. But isn’t a little bias a good thing when it comes to certain specific search results, say for instance product recommendations. They maybe able to add it to their Froogle search results maybe. Yahoo has the right mix by investing in up and coming web societies such as Flickr and Del.icio.us. I would love Google to incorporate tag based search or to even refine the concept in some way. [...]

By: vanderwal

vanderwal — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 16:14:25 +0000

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

By: WordWorks » In search of the perfect Tag Cloud

WordWorks » In search of the perfect Tag Cloud — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 17:13:55 +0000

[...] Tags are not seperate entities, they are used in the context of the material that has been tagged and hence they are related to the other tags used on the same link. One of the highlights of tagging is seen when tags are aggregated as in tag clouds. Then, we can see trends in what people are tagging: interesting links on Del.icio.us, cool pictures on Flickr, for example. These trends are trends of popularity and tag clouds should ideally have a way of depicting them. The other important issue is the one of “emergent tags“. Emergent tags are tags are tags that are in the process of becoming popular. They are valuable because they represent current trends on the net. As Joshus Porter explains : 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. [...]

By: Coelomic

Coelomic — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 05:57:30 +0000

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

By: Alex Barnett

Alex Barnett — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 14:29:54 +0000

nice post Joshua.

Related thoughts here.

On emergent tags and memetic connectivity