Comments on: Hierarchical Delicious Free Mind Map

By: Csaba’s Blog » More “order from chaos”

Csaba’s Blog » More “order from chaos” — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 14:32:24 +0000

[...] So now we need some evidence on how people use tags. I suppose the first thing to look at is how many tags individual people tend to use with individual URLs. Peroni, who has gathered many users’ information for his mindmaps estimates this figure around 10. This site is a very interesting read because he goes on to explain how you can use Pascal’s triangle to calculate the number of URLs that can be uniquely indexed by a combination of n out of a total of m tags. But this is an idealistic calculation which assumes that the tags are used independently (I think!). So I gathered some numbers from the users who generated mindmaps. There were 2202 maps from which I calculated the means and medians. The mean and medium number of links were 179 and 103, respectively. To store 179 tags, you need 10 tags used in combinations of 4. But the mean number of tags per user is 100! Obviously a sub optimal strategy by the users!!This suggests that people use many more tags than they really need for each bookmark. Many of those tags must be redundant, or even unused. Of course the result is consistent with the idea that a few, frequent tags are used as categories in a way that efficiently narrows the search. The rest of the tags are there either for redundancy, or perhaps to facilitate alternative, albeit more infrequent, access paths.Here is another interesting observation that supports this view. Golder and Huberman analyzed the tags assigned to individual URLs by individual users, in the order that the tags were assigned to that URL. What they found was that people tend to use the highest frequency tags first, then start using the lower frequency, more idiosyncratic tags. This is again consistent with the view that high frequency tags are like categories or folders to hold relevant items, while lower frequency tags add more personally oriented distinguishing features to each resource. [...]

By: Csaba’s Blog » Emerging patterns

Csaba’s Blog » Emerging patterns — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 14:38:29 +0000

[...] There is an additional implication of the fact that highly idiosyncratic tags like “must-read” don’t tend to dominate the distribution (I think there is a side issue that there are many different ways to be idiosyncratic .. it can be a tag only used by a particular individual, or alternatively it can be a tag used by more people, but each time in a highly individual way). If this is generally true, it shows that examples of this sort, which are often cited against the “tags as ontologies” notion, lose some of their power. These highly individual tags seem to me to take on a completely different role in tagging behavior. My feeling is that popular tags are about “collective categories” (of various sorts, to be discussed) and idiosyncratic tags are about user-centered, context dependent memory cues. This has at least two implications. First, we need to consider different sorts of tags .. tags are not all the same. Second, we need to find evidence that highly individual tags are even useful. They often assumed to be, in the interest of the new, empowering, free-to-chose-as-you-like paradigm. But how many things can you label “to read” before the tag loses its meaning? Like the piles of papers rising like mountains in the corners of many of our desks, I am sure! In fairness, I acknowledge the sometimes made claim that user tags have an additional (or perhaps predominant?) role in pointing to similar, possibly useful URLs. According to this view tags are different to formal categories in that the latter are about locating resources in some precise manner while the former is about navigating among potentially useful sites, using tags as pointers. But even if this is true, the point remains that tags like “must-read” and “cool” will add very different amounts of value to different audiences. There is another interesting attempt to find patterns in tags using statistical co-occurence. Here is an example of my tags translated into a mindmap. The mindmap shows two interesting patterns. First, it shows groups of tags which tend to be used for the same URL. The amount of overlap can be adjusted by a parameter, but the default is set around 60%. That is, if two tags share 60% of their URL’s they are clustered together. An example on my map is [Wikepedia encyclopedia]. More than two tags can be clustered as in [emoticons messenger smiley yahoo]. Actually this is a little more complicated because the parametrically determined number of shared tags also depends on the depth of the nodes. Nodes at the leaves can be clustered even if they share much fewer than 60%. The meaning of the hierarchical relation is the second interesting point in this map. Any tag which appears as a sub-tag in the mindmap is one that never labels a URL which is different from the one the super-tag labels. For example on my mindmap “rss” labels two URLS with the names “RSS Readers for Linux” and “FeedXs”. In turn “rss” has the sub-tags “reader”, “feeds”, “free” and “publishing”. Of these, the first is used to tag “RSS Readers for Linux” and the last three each tag “FeedXs.” So what are the additonal tags doing? One possibility is that they are in a sense redundant … rss is always free, so the two tags provide alternate routes for finding the site. In my particular folksonomy either one would have done the trick on its own, but the redundancy might help finding the resource from two different sources. Another possibility is that the additional tags refine the search. “RSS” would give two links but “rss” + “reader” gives only one. As such they act like subclasses in a formal taxonomy. Except .. they don’t. In the current example it is obvious that “reader” is not supposed to be a subclass of “rss”. Instead, I meant to have a single category “rss reader” .. but del.icio.us does not allow two-word tags! But there are other reasons for two tags to go together, apart from a design side effect and a genuine subclass. For example “September11″ and “GeorgeBush” might go together ’til the end of time, but not because one is a subclass of the other, nor is one in any sense a refinement of the other. These relationships contain valuable information, which I haven’t really thought enough about. But it is pretty clear that a number of different patterns could emerge. One observation which is pretty clear is that individual taggers (not an aggregation now) have a selected set of tags which in some sense dominates the others. Look at some numbers on the main site again. My map has the following numbers next to it: (78, 168, 56), meaning that I have 78 unique URLs tagged with a total of 168 tags, but only 56 of those are unique. The pattern here varies widely, with some people having many more total tags than main tags (lots of hierarchical clustering) and others having hardly any hierarchical use of tags. There is clearly lots of interesting information hidden in these relationships. But I haven’t yet told you about what I think is going on with the popular tags. I think this might also help us understand the individual ones ….. [...]

By: P.S.: » Tag Clouds are hard to Spam

P.S.: » Tag Clouds are hard to Spam — Tue, 07 Jun 2005 10:20:30 +0000

[...] artial translations Taoist Books Mind Map Clustering Delicious Tags Entering protolife Hierarchical Delicious Fre [...]

By: P.S.: » Clustering Delicious Tags

P.S.: » Clustering Delicious Tags — Mon, 30 May 2005 07:43:52 +0000

[...] artial translations Taoist Books Mind Map Clustering Delicious Tags Entering protolife Hierarchical Delicious Fre [...]

By: P.S.: » On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws

P.S.: » On Tag Clouds, Metric, Tag Sets and Power Laws — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:56:09 +0000

[...] artial translations Taoist Books Mind Map Clustering Delicious Tags Entering protolife Hierarchical Delicious Fre [...]

By: JOYCE

JOYCE — Mon, 16 May 2005 07:06:49 +0000

WHAT’S A URI? AND FXJ IS WHERE? THANK YOU JOYCE

By: Pietro

Pietro — Fri, 13 May 2005 09:45:26 +0000

Robb: Actually no. But I will check it out. Pietro

By: Robb Broome

Robb Broome — Thu, 12 May 2005 19:31:36 +0000

Have you seen the 3d visual thesaurus? I think that a modified version of this would be an excellent way to depict the information in del.icio.us. Nodes = tags? items related to tags = urls, with each url surrounded by all the tags it’s received? (yours or the whole community.. .

By: Pietro

Pietro — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 12:56:41 +0000

Thanks I fixed the link.

Pietro

By: ronnie

ronnie — Tue, 08 Feb 2005 12:17:10 +0000

This looks very interesting. Where can I get the python script. The link above is broken

Thanks
Ronnie