Influences on Tag Choices in del.icio.us
If bookmarking on del.icio.us is fundamentally about personal information management — organizing and re-finding your own bookmarks — then it’s important to understand why users choose the tags they do. There are two major (possibly complementary) hypotheses for how tags are chosen: a social model (we’re influenced by what others on del.icio.us say) and a nonsocial model (we largely ignore the others on del.icio.us). The social model is what del.icio.us sells itself as, but does it represent what’s really happening?
In “Influences on Tag Choices in del.icio.us,” Emilee Rader and Rick Wash from University of Michigan set out to examine for the nonsocial hypothesis by connecting the individual tag choices individuals make and the large scale patterns that appear on del.icio.us. They ran a logistic regression on tagging histories of 30 popular web pages on del.icio.us, comparing hypothesies that users imitate others, re-use tags they they have applied to other pages, and use del.icio.us’s recommended tags (presumably a combination thereof). The logit coefficients found that the imitation and recommendation coefficients are negative – that users are less likely to choose a tag if it’s appeared before or is recommended! But, there is a very large positive effect of having used a tag in the past.
This work seems to counterbalance previous work (in the same session, even!) suggesting that social factors have an impact on tag convergence.
Trip report from CSCW ‘08.