i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

During last class, while Bob was talking about bad tagging techniques, he wondered why would anybody tag a bookmark on Delicious "tagthis?" A big banner in red started flashing in my mind saying: "Gaming The System" Looking deeper into the issue, "tagthis" seems to be more innocuous than I first imagine. Apparently it was generated by tagth.is, a service that bookmarks links in tweets. This however does not deny the fact that social news networks are being actively gamed by a small but extremely devoted group of people.

Along the lines of my previous post about tagging usage in del.icio.us, you might want to take a look at TagWiz. Hyunwoo Park, Satish Polisetti, and Dhawal Mujumbar created this tool to visualize the tags of an individual user in delicious. It provides tag frequency distribution visualization and a metric of how important the long tail effect is.

To illustrate the point that Bob made in class about tagging and controlled vocabularies, you may want to take a look at SociallyDelicious. Prateek, Yo-Shang and I created this tool last year in IOLab. The main idea is to see show people tag bookmarks in del.icio.us and whether their tagging behavior is influences by their level of expertise.