1. Golder and Huberman Study
Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems
O Purpose
Analyze the structures of collaborative
system and their dynamic aspects

2. Description of the Study
O Data from delicious analyzed to uncover
patterns among users, tags, and URLs
O Data sets retrieved between the morning
of Friday June 23 and the morning of
Monday June 27, 2005
O Data sets created by
O Retrieving public RSS feeds
O Then crawling a portion of the website

3. Findings
O Regularities in:
O user activity
O tag frequencies
O kinds of tags used
O bursts of popularity in bookmarking
O remarkable stability in the relative
proportions of tags within a given URL

4. Findings (cont.)
O Users vary greatly in the frequency and nature
of their delicious use
O Weak relationship between age of the user’s
account age and the number of days on which
they created at least one bookmark
O Identified the following functions tags
performed:
O What it is about
O Who owns it
O What it is
O Refining categories
O Identifying qualities or characteristics
O Self reference
O Task organizing

5. Conclusions
O Tagging users exhibit a great variety in their
sets of tags
O Minority opinions can coexist alongside
extremely popular ones without disrupting
nearly stable consensus choices
O Most tagging is done for personal benefit,
but can still benefit others
O Tagged bookmarks may be valuable in
aggregate to describe and organize how web
documents interact with one another

6. Further Study
O Sites such as delicious continue to be
fertile ground for studying computer-
mediated collaborative systems
O Collaborative tagging sites will continue to
provide new ways to share and organize
content as site features expand and
improve