Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems

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 dynamic 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 dynamic model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.

Keywords

collaborative tagging folksonomy Del.icio.us bookmarks web sharing

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

J. Rowley , Organizing Knowledge( Gower, Brookfield, VT , 1995).

C. Shirky , Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links and Tags(2005). Available at: www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html (accessed 10 October 2005).

A. Doan , J. Madhavan , P. Domingos and A. Halevy , Learning to map between ontologies on the semantic Web . In: Proceedings of the International World Wide Web Conference (Honolulu, 2002)(ACM Press, New York, 2002) 662–673 .

A. Mathes , Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata(2004). Available at: www.adammathes.com/academic/computermediatedcommunication/folksonomies.html (accessed 10 October 2005).

Del.icio.us. Available at: http://del.icio.us/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

Yahoo , My Web 2.0. Available at: http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myweb/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

CiteULike. Available at: www.citeulike.org/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

Connotea. Available at: www.connotea.org/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

Technorati. Available at: www.technorati.com/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

10.

W. Jones , A. Phuwanartnurak , R. Gill and H. Bruce , Don't take my folders away! Organizing personal information to get things done . In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2–7 April 2005, Portland, OR(ACM Press, New York, 2005) 1505–1508 .

11.

J. Pustejovsky , The Generative Lexicon( MIT Press, Cambridge, MA , 1995).

12.

J. Tanaka and M. Taylor , Object categories and expertise: is the basic level in the eye of the beholder? Cognitive Psychology 23(3) (1991) 457–482 .

13.

K. Weick , K. Sutcliffe and D. Obstfeld , Organizing and the process of sensemaking , Organizational Science 16(4) (2005) 409–421 .

14.

W. Labov , The boundaries of words and their meanings. In C.J. Bailey and R. Shy (eds), New Ways of Analyzing Variation in English(1973) 340–373.

15.

S. Dumais , E. Cutrell , J. Cadiz , G. Jancke , R. Sarin and D. Robbins , Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use . In: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Information Retrieval, 28 July to 1 August 2003, Toronto(ACM Press, New York, 2003) 72–79 .

16.

T. Coates , Two Cultures of Fauxonomies Collide(2005). Available at: http://plasticbag.org (accessed 10 October 2005).

17.

M. Biddulph , Introducing Del.icio.us.XML.com(2004). Available at: www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/11/10/delicious.html (accessed 10 October 2005).

18.

R. Kumar , J. Novak , P. Raghavan and A. Tomkins , On the bursty evolution of blogspace . In: Proceedings of The International World Wide Web Conference 20–24 May 2003, Budapest, 568–576 .

19.

F. Wu and B. Huberman , Social Structure and Opinion Formation(2005). Available at: www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/opinions/opinions.pdf (accessed 10 October 2005).

20.

S. Bikhchandani , D. Hirshleifer and I. Welch , Learning from the behavior of others: conformity, fads and informational cascades , Journal of Economic Perspectives 12(3) (1998) 151–170 .

21.

Cloudalicious. Available at: http://cloudalicio.us/ (accessed 10 October 2005).

22.

F. Eggenberger and G. Polya , ‘ber die Statistik verkettete Vorgänge , Zeitschrift für Angewandte Mathematik und Mechanik 1 (1923) 279–289 .

23.

R. Cialdini , Influence: Science and Practice( Allyn and Bacon, Boston, MA , 1998).

24.

P. Speroni , Tagclouds and Cultural Changes(2005). Available at: http://blog.pietrosperoni.it (accessed 10 October 2005).