PUBLIC MARKS with tags tagging & folksonomy

research on tagging, folksonomy

To investigate what words and phrases people associate with Web 2.0, I took a close look at two popular Web 2.0-ish articles and noted what tags people stored them under in del.icio.us. The first post was Adam Rifkin's fantastic Weblications. It currently has 99 people linking to it on del.icio.us and here is an excel chart showing the top tags:

* Misspelt tags (e.g., libary, libray) * Badly encoded tags, such as unlikely compound word groupings (e.g.,TimBernersLee) * Tags that do not follow convention in issues such as case and number; singular versus plural form (e.g., apple, apples) * Personal tags that are without meaning to the wider community (e.g., mydog) * Single-use tags that appear only once in the database. (e.g., billybobsdog)

1. Introduction A folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined. A general review of social bookmarking tools, one popular use area of folksonomies, was given in the April edition of D-Lib [1]. In the article the authors elaborate on the approach taken by social classification systems and the motivators behind tagging. They write, "...tags are just one kind of metadata and are not a replacement for formal classification systems such as Dublin Core, MODS, etc.... Rather, they are a supplemental means to organise information and order search results."

A social bookmarking site for news readers

Open Source Tagging / Folksonomy module for PHP/MySQL applications

Zhubert now supports tagging!

In order to understand how we can make tags more searchable it is important to understand users and why they submit certain tags. At this time, little is known about the decision-making process behind tag selection, and quantitative data is relatively scarce. One useful approach might be to examine users' motivations when adding tags, see why they decide on particular words, observe how many tags they add and compare how the same items are classified by different users. It might also be helpful to see how feedback affects tag use and how users modify tags in the light of the behaviour of others. However, such studies take time and resources.

Cloudalicious - Watching Tag Clouds Over Time

Google start page featuring a tag cloud consisting of recent/popular Google searches.

CNET Japan ＞フォルクソノミー、タグ ・Thomas Vander Walは、美術館の所蔵品にタグを付けるプロジェクトを例に挙げる。このプロジェクトは、ある美術館のコンソーシアムが検討しているもので、来館者が作品にタグを付けられるようにすることで、ある作品に興味を持った人が、他の来館者が付けたタグを見て、その作品を多面的に理解できるようにすることを目指している。 ・「Flickrユーザーの写真にタグを付けるのは、その写真に好意を持っていることを示すためだ」とMcGonigalはいう。「抱きしめる代わり、といってもいいかもしれない」（McGoniga）