I had reason recently to immerse myself in the social tagging literature. Aside from the “classic” clay shirky article on ontologies there have been some recent studies exploring social tagging.
Brooks, C., Montanez, N., (2006). Improved annotation of the blogosphere via autotagging and hierarchical clustering. WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Analysis of technorati tagging data to assess effectiveness of tagging systems relative to autotagging (through classic IR keyword extraction techniques). The winner? Autotagging. Of course, you don’t get that extra benefit of social networking with autotagging…
Marlow, C., Naarman, M., boyd, D., Davis, M. (2006). HT06, tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, to read. HT 2006.
This is a good overview, if you want a fairly thorough intro to the space. Also an analysis of flickr tagging, providing some basic usage statistics.
Golder, S. A., Huberman, B. A. (2006?) The structure of collaborative tagging systems. http://arxiv.org/ftp/cs/papers/0508/0508082.pdf
Analysis of tagging in del.icio.us, some basic usage info.
Kim, J., Candan, K. (2006). CP/CV Concept Similarity Mining without frequency information from domain describing taxonomies. CIKM 2006. Lee, Kathy. (2006). What goes around comes around: an analysis of del.icio.us as social space. CSCW 2006.
Interesting. Finds that the social presence indicators significantly increase tagging behavior in del.icio.us.
Wu, X., Zhang, L., Yu, Y. (2006). Exploring social annotations for the semantic web. WWW 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Great paper, exploring deriving emergent semantics from social annotations using de.licio.us data.
I need to look up Merholz metadata for the masses, and Mika Ontologies are us. A few of the articles I liked the most came from the WWW 2006 conference…I have to admit I had thought this more of a 2nd tier conference but the quality of these papers is making me rethink going to the next one.
