PUBLIC MARKS from ycc2106 with tags tagging & article

Cataloging how to, how is and history

... makes it popular) Thomas Van Der Wal: Explaining and Showing Broad and Narrow Folksonomies Adam Weinroth: Tag Team Michael Wexler: I hate tags , I still hate tagging , I continue to despise tagging Mimi Yen: Hierarchy Versus Facets Versus Tags

I was thinking about bookmarks the other night and about how much they suck and about how much I hate them.

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)

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.