Collaborative Tagging and Information Management: Influences on Tag Choices in del.icio.us

Collaborative tagging systems have the potential to produce socially constructed information organization schemes. However, their effectiveness depends on how users choose tags. Using data from del.icio.us, a popular collaborative tagging system for organizing web bookmarks, we quantitatively test three hypotheses concerning users’ tag choices: 1) Users imitate other user’s choices of tags, 2) Users choose tags from the organization of their own personal collection, and 3) Users choose tags recommended by the system. We find evidence for strong influence of a user’s existing organization and little evidence to support the other hypotheses. ACM Classification