Personal Information Management vs. Resource Sharing: Towards a Model of Information Behavior in Social Tagging Systems

Abstract

Social tagging systems allow users to upload and assign keywords to digital resources. Thus a body of user annotated resources gradually evolves: Users can share resources, re-find their own resources or use the systems as search engines for items added by the whole user population. In this paper we want to contribute towards a better understanding of usage patterns within social tagging systems by presenting results from a survey of 142 users of the systems. Flickr, Youtube, Delicious and Connotea. Data was gathered partly by using the Mechanical Turk service, and partly via an announcement on the Connotea blog. Our study reveals differences of user motivation and tag usage between systems. While (resource) sharing emerges as an all-embracing intra-system motivation, users differ with respect to social spheres of sharing. Based on our results which we integrated with earlier research from Cool and Belkin (2002), we propose a model of information behaviour in social tagging systems.

Why do Users Tag? Detecting Users’ Motivation for Tagging in Social Tagging Systems

“…At this time, the work by (Golder and Huberman 2006) and (Marlow et al 2006) have made advances towards expanding our theoretical understanding of tagging motivation by identifying and classifying user motivation in tagging systems. Their work was followed by studies proposing generalizations, refinements and extensions to previous classifications (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009). An influential observation was made by (Coates 2005) and elaborated on and interpreted in (Marlow et al 2006), (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009) and (Körner 2009).…”

“…Their work was followed by studies proposing generalizations, refinements and extensions to previous classifications (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009). An influential observation was made by (Coates 2005) and elaborated on and interpreted in (Marlow et al 2006), (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009) and (Körner 2009). This line of work suggests that a distinction between at least two types of user motivation for tagging is important: On one hand, users who are motivated by categorization view tagging as a means to categorize resources according to some high-level characteristics.…”

“…In order to assess the general usefulness of algorithms that aim to -for example -capture knowledge from folksonomies, we would need to know whether these algorithms produce similar results across user populations driven by different motivations for tagging. Recent research already suggests that different tagging systems afford different motivations for tagging (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009), (Hammond et al 2005). Further work presents anecdotal evidence that even within the same tagging system, the motivation for tagging between individual users may vary greatly (Wash and Rader 2007).…”

“…A question that has recently attracted the interest of our community is whether the properties of tags in tagging systems and their usefulness for different purposes can be assumed to be a function of the taggers' motivation or intention behind tagging (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009). If this was the case, the motivation for tagging (why users tag) would have broad implications.…”

Patterns in Interactive Tagging Networks

“…The most important feature of the social tagging systems is that although users behave as they like, the systems produce the well-organized tagging result that is useful as the meta-data of resources (Halpin, Robu, and Shepherd 2007). Researchers have also studied several aspects of the tagging systems: analyzing users' tagging motivations (Heckner, Heilemann, and Wolff 2009;Körner et al 2010b), identifying the user interests on the tagging systems (Li, Guo, and Zhao 2008;Yin et al 2011), and investigating the usefulness of the tagging results for the recommender systems (Guan et al 2010) and the web search (Bao et al 2007;Heymann, Koutrika, and Garcia-Molina 2008). Social tagging systems are often modeled as the graphs where users and resources are represented as nodes and these nodes are connected if users tag resources.…”