Thursday, 29 September 2005
Web 2.0 Tagging Study, Part 1: How Much We Tag 
« Web 2.0 Quick Study: Tag Use Patterns | Main | (D)Evolution 2.0 »
Yesterday I posted an entry describing 3 very distinct tag usage patterns:
- limited set of tags, resulting in a nice and compact tag cloud
- large set of tags used mostly as keywords, to increase findability
- even larget set of specialized tags with its own tagging schema
These three patterns are the result of my observations of tagging at Simpy. These were my surface-level observations. As usual in life, the juicy stuff lies below the surface.
After some digging through Simpy's backend, I found that Simpy users are quite dilligent about tagging. 98.73% of all links in Simpy are tagged! However, this has to be taken with a grain of salt, as Simpy let's users upload their browser bookmarks, and in the process extracts tags from folder names, folder paths, and bookmark titles. The following chart shows this:
If you read this blog, you know I'm a big fan of rich, natural language-like multi-word tags. Naturally, I was curious about how popular multi-word tags are, and here is what I found:
As you can see, people predominantly use single-word tags. 98% of all tags are single-word tags. I have to say I was surprised by such a high percentage. I thought more people would use multi-word tags. Curious about my own behaviour, I looked at the makeup of my tags and found that 13.5% of my tags are multi-word tags. I suppose I'm a tagging outcast.
That's all for this study. In the next study we'll look at private vs. public links and consequently private and public tags and how the tagging behaviour differs in those two contexts.
