HT06, Position Paper, Tagging, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic
Article, ToRead, Presentation
Cameron Marlow, Mor Naaman, danah boyd, Marc Davis
Yahoo! Research
What Are Tags?
“A tag is a keyword or descriptive term associated with an
item as means of classification by means of a folksonomy.
Tags are usually chosen informally and personally by the
author/creator of the item — i.e. not usually as part of some
formally defined classification scheme. Tags are typically used
in dynamic, flexible, automatically generated internet
taxonomies for online resources such as computer files, web
pages, digital images, and internet bookmarks.”
Wikipedia, 2006
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Del.icio.us
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Flickr
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Why Yahoo?
Yahoo, circa 1996
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Why Yahoo?
Yahoo, circa 2004
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Why Yahoo?
+
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Motivation
 Introduce tagging for academic audiences
 Create a common language for current practitioners
 Point to potential and possible directions of further
research
 Method
Develop a model of tagging
Survey existing systems and features
Develop taxonomy
Tagging Model
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Taxonomy
Prelim. Study
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Tagging Systems: Simple Model
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Tagging - Simple Model
 Keywords
 Describing connected resources
 Sounds familiar?
(Automatic resource compilation by analyzing hyperlink structure and
associated text, Chakrabarti et al, 1998)
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What About Anchor Text?
 Democratization and personalization
 Extent and scale
 User-inclusive model (not site- or page-based)
 Notion of connected/related users
 Intent of action (e.g., description vs. navigation or
reference)
 Richness of context
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Wait! Where Are We?
Tagging Model
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Taxonomy
Prelim Study
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Taxonomy
 Create a common language
 Point out differences and generative factors
 Two taxonomies
Systems
Incentives (see paper)
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Systems Taxonomy
 Who
 How
 What
 Where from
 …
Structure and nature of
resulting tags
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Tagging Rights
 Who is allowed to tag a resource?
Self-tagging
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Permission-based
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Open
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Tagging Support
 Does the system “help” in tagging?
Blind
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Suggested
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Viewable
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Tag Aggregation
 How tags for individual resources are aggregated
Set
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Bag
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Object Type
 What is the type of resource being tagged?
Textual
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Non-textual
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Object Source
 Where the object media originates from
User-contributed
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System
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Global
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Where are we now?
Tagging Model
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Taxonomy
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Case Study: Flickr and Del.icio.us
 Flickr
Rights:
Permission-based
Support:
Blind
Aggregation:
Set
Type:
Non-textual
Source:
User-contributed
 Del.icio.us
Rights:
Owner
Support:
Suggested
Aggregation:
Bag
Type:
Textual
Source:
Global
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Growth of tags
Total number of distinct tags
 Number of distinct tags in 10 user collections, over time
Index of photo
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Similar to del.icio.us?
Scales are different!
Figure from Golder
et al, 2005
Total number of distinct tags
1000
500
0
0
2500
5000
Index of bookmark
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Total number of distinct tags
Together
Index of photo
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Case Study: Flickr and Del.icio.us
 Flickr
Rights:
Permission-based
Support:
Blind
Aggregation:
Set
Type:
Non-textual
Source:
User-contributed
 Del.icio.us
Rights:
Owner
Support:
Suggested
Aggregation:
Bag
Type:
Textual
Source:
Global
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Case Study: Flickr
 Nobody tags other people’s content
 Why?
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Not collected
In user’s account
Not identified
As coming from the tagger
Not prominent
In the interface, as “opinion”
Not aggregated
Can’t “vote” on tag/item pair
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Almost done
Tagging Model
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Taxonomy
Prelim. Study
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Future Research
 Search / IR
Comparison of hypertext and tags
Spam detection
 Linguistics / NLP
Taxonomy generation
Sociolinguistics
 Collaborative Filtering
Identify trends (locally and globally)
Trust metrics
Identify influencers
 …
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Thank You
Cameron Marlow
cameronm@yahoo-inc.com
http://research.yahoo.com
Data?
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