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Jason Morrison Presentation to the Cleveland Area Web Standards Group 09 Oct 2007 Original Article: Why are they tagging, and why do we want them to?. Tags... What are they good for?. Adding tagging to your site.
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Jason Morrison Presentation to the Cleveland Area Web Standards Group 09 Oct 2007 Original Article: Why are they tagging, and why do we want them to? Tags... What are they good for?
Adding tagging to your site • When thinking about adding tagging to a site, the first question should be: What do we want to get out of this? • My guess: a folksonomy is most likely to be successful when the goals of the website intersect with the motivations of users.
What are folksonomies for? • Organize Information • Classification, relationships • Information Retrieval (IR) • Searching, browsing • Information Scent • Are you on the right track?
What else are folksonomies for? • Encourage interaction • One more small way in which users can participate, like polls • Prompt users to create accounts • Our own nefarious purposes • Find terms for a synonym ring or build a controlled vocabulary • Discover and track trends within you user population
Why are users tagging? • Users tag things in order to find them again later. • Del.icio.us (bookmarks) • Flickr (photos) • Users tag things to get exposure and traffic. • Technorati • Is this meta keywords all over again?
Why are users tagging? • Users tag things as a way of voicing their opinions. • Slashdot • Users tag things incidentally as they perform other IR tasks. • Mealographer
Why are users tagging? • Users tag things to take advantage of functionality built on top of a folksonomy. • “Related Posts” functionality in Blogs • Users tag things to play a game or earn points. • The ESP Game
What else? • These aren't exhaustive lists... can you think of other uses for folksonomies on your sites, or other reason why users tag? • Not a lot of research on effectiveness
My Research • Folksonomies from social bookmarking sites supported web search about as well as traditional directories • Meta-searching a folksonomy could improve search results • Folksonomies could be improved pretty easily: • Support for query operators • Multi-word tags