All Annotations of i d e a n t: A del.icio.us study[Preview]

saved by37 people, first byTorsten Rox on 2006-03-31, last byChristophe Deschamps on 2008-08-04

• Working within the constraints of a very limited data sample, this
  study attempts to identify some of the information management and
  meaning construction practices of an online distributed classification
  (a.k.a. free tagging or ethnoclassification) community. Specifically,
  this study seeks to investigate the social and communicative practices
  that emerge when users are encouraged to share web links with one
  another by using a metadata keyword, or tag, to demark a social group,
  apart from using other tags to classify links according to an emergent
  taxonomy.
• ou submit your links to a website, adding some descriptive text  and keywords, and del.icio.us aggregates your post with everyone  else's submissions--letting you slice and dice the information any way you like. Posts with the same keywords are clumped  together, and if enough people link to a URL, a loose classification emerges. (Biddulph, 2004)
• Just six tags  (python, delicious/del.icio.us, programming, hacks, tools, and web)  account for 80% of all the tags chosen, and a long tail of 58  other tags make up the remaining 20%,
• Key Concepts
• it is hard for people to make the initial conceptual shift from traditional forms of classification (using fixed taxonomies) to distributed classification schemes (using flexible taxonomies). The freedom to define individual and social structures of classification emergently can be perceived as chaotic, lacking rigor and utility. However, the more comfortable users become with a system’s features, the more aware they become of the benefits of distributed classification, and the more aware they also become of working within its limitations.
  
• It can be argued that distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us do not exhibit some of the features commonly thought of as necessary to support online communities (features such as the ability to access ‘profile’ knowledge about individual users, the ability to communicate directly with other users, and the ability to rate the quality of submissions). It seems that del.icio.us did not set out to become that kind of community tool, so those features might never become part of its toolset. However, one question to explore further is to what degree such features would enhance the sense of community, or if there are other ways in which del.icio.us accomplishing that.
• are contributing not only to that particular community, but to the larger del.icio.us community and their efforts.

• on 2006-03-31 Kossatsch
  via plainjochen
• on 2006-10-26 Project-tnn
  Article about studying tagging on del.icio.us
• on 2006-11-09 Wbmook
  Okay, maybe I'll actually read this at some point