October 18th, 2009 Comments Off
By Emilee Rader and Rick Wash
Collaborative tagging systems have the potential to produce socially constructed information organization schemes. The effectiveness of tags for finding and re-finding information depends upon how individual users choose tags; however, influences on users’ tag choices are poorly understood. We quantitatively test competing hypotheses from the literature concerning these choices, using data from del.icio.us (a collaborative tagging system for organizing web bookmarks) and a computer model of possible tag choice strategies. We find evidence that users choose tags in a pattern consistent with personal information management goals, rather than as a result of social influence.
Emilee Rader and Rick Wash. “Influences on Tag Choices in del.icio.us,” Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), November 2008
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October 18th, 2009 Comments Off
By Rick Wash and Emilee Rader
Understanding how users choose tags can help researchers better understand how tagging systems can be used and how to design better tagging systems for the future. We developed a simulation of del.icio.us, a popular social bookmarking tool, that allowed us to simulate users choosing tags using one of four possible strategies for tag choice found in the literature. We then compared the resulting tag choices with empirical data retrieved from del.icio.us to determine which tag choice strategies would result in choices most similar to those seen in the real world. We were able to rule out three of the strategies as unlikely to be the primary means by which tags are chosen on del.icio.us.
Rick Wash and Emilee Rader, “Understanding del.icio.us Tag Choice Using Simulations,” Presented at iConference 2008, Paper Track. February 2008
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October 18th, 2009 Comments Off
By Rick Wash and Emilee Rader
Users of social computing websites are both producers and consumers of the information found on the site. This creates a novel problem for web-based software applications: how can website designers induce users to produce information that is useful for others? We study this question by interviewing users of the social bookmarking website del.icio.us. We find that for the users in our sample, metadata reflecting who bookmarked a webpage better supports information seeking than free-form keyword metadata (tags). We explain this finding by describing differences in the way that the design of del.icio.us motivates users to contribute by providing personal benefits for bookmarking and tagging.
Rick Wash and Emilee Rader. “Public Bookmarks and Private Benefits: An Analysis of Incentives in Social Computing,“ Proceedings of the ASIS&T Annual Meeting. December 2007
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October 18th, 2009 Comments Off
By Emilee Rader and Rick Wash
del.icio.us is a website for “social bookmarking” where users can store and access their bookmarks online, along with descriptive keywords or “tags.” When a user of del.icio.us logs in to their account and adds a bookmark, she may also tag that bookmark with any 10 or fewer single words that she feels are somehow related to that web page. Both the tags and the bookmarks are then publicly available; searching by a tag produces all of the bookmarked web pages ever tagged with that word. Because the tags are public, it is possible that users’ choices regarding what tags to apply could be influenced by the tagging practices of others, and a consensus might emerge for which tags should be used in a given context. However, it has long been accepted that people use language imprecisely, and meaning is negotiated on-the-fly during conversation. This imprecision is evident not only in communication, but also when people are asked to create keywords for recipes and names for common editing operations, and when user-generated index terms are compared with Library of Congress subject headings. In fact, the probability that two people will generate the same label for the same object is widely held to be less than 20%.
A question remains about whether users of del.icio.us practice social or selfish tagging. An analysis of bookmark, user and tag data for 349 web pages downloaded via del.icio.us was conducted to discover whether the “vocabulary problem” is present in the way users select tags for web pages. Results indicate that there is very little inter-user agreement, suggesting that most users consciously or inadvertently tag selfishly. These tagging practices have important implications for the findability of web pages in del.icio.us.
Emilee Rader and Rick Wash, “Tagging with Del.icio.us: Social or Selfish?“ Extended Abstract at Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) 06 Poster Session. November 2006.
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