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April 26, 2006
Panel - Why do Tagging Work
The discussion will be about how tagging work, why people tag and how does it scales.
Presenter
Kevin Fox, Google
George Furnas, U of Michigan
Scott Golder, HP Labs
Joshua Schachter, Del.icio.us
Rashmi Sinha, Uzanto
Marc Davis and Mor Naaman, Yahoo! Research Lab
Yahoo! Research Lab presented Zonetag, a tagging system for photos.
A live tagging game is available to CHI attendees
Live Tagging Game
A network centric view of tag is to relate tagged entities together by using similar tag.
Another way to look at tags is to add handles, add routes to get at things.
The issue then is that people come with different ideas to refer to the same things.
Tags can be understand as additional layers of attention according to Joshua Schachter.
Tagging has become a social phenomena in addition to the information organization system it used to be.
Tags can be used to annotate things for other to find and the idea of consensus tags is developing. For example, people attending CHI will tag their things with chi2006 for others to find more easily.
However, tags can also be used for self-referential use (ex: job search, my car,...)
Why people tag?
Only 25% of people agree on one consensus tag for the same object. 20 or more tags are needed to get 80% consensus.
People overestimates how well they do when they tag and how they will perform when retrieving.
If people are connected in a social network (friends on Flickr,...), their tags tend to convergence and community are developing around tags.
A video showed that most people don't know what del.icio.us is.
Will tags be adopted by users outside of the tech community? The discussion came down to whether tags was the proper word to use. label or keyword may be a better fit.
Will tags become mainstream if integrated in MySpace and it is possible to tag users? There is a chance that in this context they may be understand as badges representing the social status of the user being tagged
How does it scale?
A issue that was discussed was the granularity of the tagging. A person may tag all his Tokyo photos as tokyo including ones of his hotel room, which may not seem relevant to other people looking for tokyo related photos. One solution discussed was to use photos pool and groups.
Posted by sv5 at April 26, 2006 08:40 AM