Understanding the Role of Tagging in Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a website designed for 'social bookmarking.' On this website, users can submit URL's to be bookmarked, and include with those URLs a set of keywords, called "tags," that the user feels are relevant to the bookmarked site. Users can also create 'subscriptions' which function as filters. Any time a URL is submitted as a bookmark on the site and it matches the user's subscription, that URL is put into the users inbox for perusal. Users can subscribe by matching tags and/or subscribe to bookmarks submitted by a specific user.

User-contributed metadata, also known as tagging, is increasingly receiving attention as a low-effort tool for digital information management. Collaborative tagging systems provide a means for users to associate personally salient keywords or labels with content items, and then publicly expose these associations, so everyone can benefit from this information. Most research in this area has focused on the outputs of these systems, such as the ‘folksonomy’ that emerges from many users making many tag choices. Instead, we focus on the inputs; how do users choose which words to use as tags and when to apply them to a content item? We also look at how systematic differences in this input -- tag choices -- lead to specific patterns in the output folksonomy, which after all is an aggregate of these tag choices. This mixed method project uses qualitative interviews, large-scale statistical analysis, and computer simulations to understand user behavior on a prototypical tagging system -- del.icio.us.

The Vocabulary Problem of del.icio.us:

Participants: Rick Wash and Emilee Rader

Publications

• Public Bookmarks and Private Incentives: The Role of Tagging in Social Bookmarking. ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting. (Paper)
• Tagging in del.icio.us: Social or Selfish? Presented at CSCW 2006 Poster Session. (Poster, Paper)
• Understanding del.icio.us Tag Choice Using Simulations. At iConference 2008, Paper Track.

Works-in-Progress

• A work in progress quantitatively testing competing hypotheses about what influences user tag choices. (September, 2007)
• Another work in progress, on collaborative filtering (September, 2006)

-- RickWash - 20 Sep 2007

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