Reuse, Temporal Dynamics, Interest Sharing, and Collaboration in Social Tagging Systems

TL;DR

This paper analyzes user behavior in social tagging systems, focusing on content creation patterns, vocabulary evolution over time, and social interactions to inform system improvements.

Contribution

It provides a detailed characterization of tagging systems, highlighting usage patterns, temporal dynamics, and social sharing aspects to guide future design.

Findings

Users produce tags and items in identifiable patterns

Tag vocabularies evolve over time with specific dynamics

Social sharing influences tagging behavior

Abstract

User-generated content is shaping the dynamics of the World Wide Web. Indeed, an increasingly large number of systems provide mechanisms to support the growing demand for content creation, sharing, and management. Tagging systems are a particular class of these systems where users share and collaboratively annotate content such as photos and URLs. This collaborative behavior and the pool of user-generated metadata create opportunities to improve existing systems and to design new mechanisms. However, to realize this potential, it is necessary to understand the usage characteristics of current systems. This work addresses this issue characterizing three tagging systems (CiteULike, Connotea and del.icio.us) while focusing on three aspects: i) the patterns of information (tags and items) production; ii) the temporal dynamics of users' tag vocabularies; and, iii) the social aspects of tagging systems.