Individuals often imitate each other to fall into the typical group, leading to a self-organized state of typical behaviors in a community. In this paper, we model self-organization in social tagging systems and illustrate the underlying interaction and dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a model in which individuals adjust their own tagging tendency to imitate the average tagging tendency. We found that when users are of low confidence, they tend to imitate others and lead to a self-organized state with active tagging. On the other hand, when users are of high confidence and are stubborn to change, tagging becomes inactive. We observe a phase transition at a critical level of user confidence when the system changes from one regime to the other. The distributions of post length obtained from the model are compared to real data, which show good agreement.
Tagging systems represent the conceptual knowledge of a community. We experimentally tested whether people harness this collective knowledge when navigating through the Web. As a within-factor we manipulated people's prior knowledge (no knowledge vs. prior knowledge that was congruent/incongruent to the collective knowledge inherent in the tags). As between-factor we manipulated whether people had tag clouds available or not. In line with the Information Foraging Theory and with the Co-Evolution Model of individual learning and collective knowledge building, we found that people's prior knowledge and tag clouds influenced their navigation
Abstract. Web-based tagging systems for educational resources allow users
to associate free keywords with resources to facilitate their retrieval and
reuse. This paper looks at the similarities and differences among three
different systems. We first focus on the purpose of tagging and the
incentives for users to tag educational resources. Then, we compare the
most used tags in each system. We find that even if the tagging system
design decisions differ, there is a number of similarities in tags that are
shared among more than one of the services. Moreover, our goal is to
discuss the reuse of tags across these systems and use them as a
navigational aid for a user to cross system boundaries.