We interrupt this blogcast to....
While the blogosphere is abuzz with Web 2.0 memes, I recently came across this picture depicting the pathetic state of (d)evolution 2.0:
Yesterday I posted an entry describing 3 very distinct tag usage patterns:
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.
Reading about the Cognitive Analysis of Tagging reminded me of some interesting uses of tags that I've observed on Simpy. Here are three users who make interesting and very different use of tag support in Simpy:
User lrhale uses week days (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) for his/her tags almost exclusively. I wonder why he/she does that, and I wonder how this user makes use of links organized by day of the week. Perhaps he/she has certain days designated for checking up on a certain set of sites/links? I don't know. Interestingly, Saturday and Saturday tags are less frequently used than other week days. Does that imply less activity during those days for this user? Again, I don't know. Regardless, this use of tags makes for a very nice and tight tag cloud. Lesson 1: if you want pretty tag clouds, use a small set of distinct tags.
For the second example of tag use I'll use myself. As you can see from my tags, I have a much larger set of tags than lrhale, as I use them mostly to improve recall (read: searching, findability) of links later on. I described this tag use case a while back in Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags entry. Because of my large ever-expanding tag set, my tag cloud is rather large. Lesson 2: if you use search as the means of finding and navigating information, and want to increase your chances of finding links, use tags more as descriptive keywords, and less as grouping labels.
For the last example I'll use Jarkko, who uses the most elaborate tagging scheme I have ever seen on any, tagging site out there. If you thought my tag cloud was large, look at Jarkko's tag cloud. It's huuuge! But look closely at that tag cloud, and you'll spot some interesting uses of tags. The following three patterns caught my attention:
I don't know what the distinction between Jarkko's last two tagging patterns is, but I am wondering whether other Simpy users have the need for "show me all links I tagged in domain X" or "show me all links I tagged for host name Y". Do you?
If you spot other interesting tag usage patterns and want to share them, let me know, and I may include them in this entry.
Rashmi Sinha posted an interesting entry titled A cognitive analysis of tagging. I think readers of this blog may find it interesting. This reminds me of the Categories vs. Keywords vs. Labels vs. Tags post.
Ian David runs Planet Web 2.0 an interesting site that aggregates information from blogs of various Web 2.0 projects and companies. Ian contacted me recently for a quick 5-question interview about Web 2.0.
Simpify!
Technorati Tags: web 2.0 interview Otis Gospodnetic tagging folksonomy
Paolo Massa wrote Identity Burro, a nice little Greasemonkey script that lets you hop from a person's page on one "social site" to his/her page on another "social site", thus giving you a more global picture of that person. Cute, although not perfect, because it assumes people use the same username on all supported sites, which is not always true. Once a global identity management system emerges, and it will, problems like this one will be solved.
A 3+1 sentence post.
A few people expressed concerns about how Bookmarker, a WordPress plugin, will be used. I contacted Aleksey, its author, and explained the situation. He agreed and decided to terminate Bookmarker.
