This visual comes from Rashimi Sinha's essay on the question Why do people tag?
For many, tagging is for sharing their own information and watching others. Even if you tag mostly to remember your own stuff, it is difficult to remain untouched by the presence of others. This article will explore how tagging lets us connect with others.
Rashimi also wrote another interesting essay entitled "A Cognitive analysis of tagging (or how the lower cognitive cost of tagging makes it popular." The conclusion:
"The beauty of tagging is that it taps into an existing cognitive process without adding add much cognitive cost. At the cognitive level, people already make local, conceptual observations. Tagging decouples these conceptual observations from concerns about the overall categorical scheme. The challenge for tagging systems is to then do what the brain does - intelligent computation to make sense of these local observations, and an efficient, predictable way to ensure findability."
I refound this paper while browsing through the research papers presented at the Collaborative Tagging Workshop.
The paper that caught my eye was about the use of tagging on a corporate intranet. It describes the design and implementation of a pilot (not yet completed). Some of the questions they hope to learn in the evaluation are:
Our main objective is to determine whether social bookmarking tools can be useful to our employees. We would like to understand in which ways the tool is being used, e.g., simply as a personal bookmarking tool, for information discovery, as a mechanism for sharing and disseminating information, as a repository for project-related resources, and/or for expert finding.We are also interested in the social influences and evolution. Will virtual communities develop? Are people more likely to copy or view the most popular bookmarks (hence making them more popular)? How will use and behaviors (both individual and community) change over time? Are people more likely to use tags others have already adopted? Will tags begin to converge ? Will new tags be introduced as “communicative tools” and will they be adopted by others? What other innovative or unanticipated uses will emerge?